Oh, not this again. No, it's not a net negative in ALL forms. And if you really were concerned about downsides, AI has a ton more potential downsides than Web3 ever did, including human extinction, as many of its top proponents have come out and publicly said. Nothing even remotely close to that is the case for Web3 at all:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/30/technology/ai-threat-warn...

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/may/10/ai-poses-...

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/may/30/risk-of-e...

https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/30/23742005/ai-risk-warning-...

" many of its top proponents have come out and publicly said." You don't have to uncritically accept that, it's far more likely that they're just self aggrandizing in a "wow I'm so smart my inventions can destroy the world, better give me more money and write articles about me to make sure that doesn't happen".

I see, so when it comes to the top experts in AI screaming “we made a mistake, please be careful” we should use nuance and actually conclude the opposite — that we should press ahead and they’re wrong.

But with Web3, we should just listen to a bunch of random no-name haters say “there are NO GOOD APPLICATIONS, trust us, period, stop talking about it”, use no nuance or critical thinking of our own, and simply stop building on Web3.

Do you happen to see the extreme double standard here you’re employing, while trying to get people to see things your way?

The crypto group had a lot of time and even more money to make a compelling product that took off and so far they've failed. We've watched fraud after fraud as they've shown themselves to just be ignorant and arrogant ideologues who don't understand how the "modern" finance system came to be, what the average user wants out of financial or social products, or just outright scammers. We can keep sinking money into a bottomless pit or we can move on and learn from their mistakes.

I didn't say to dismiss any concerns out of hand, but the whole idea of "x-risk" or "human extinction" from ai is laughable and isn't taken seriously by most people. Again if you think critically about the whole idea of "human extinction" from any of the technology being talked about you should see it as nonsense.

I dunno, on the crypto side stablecoins are pretty compelling for hassle-free cross-border transfers—there’s $125bn in circulation, which to me means it’s taken off.

On the AI side, I mean for example it’s not laughable to think anybody on the planet could just feed a bunch of synthetic biology papers to a model and start designing bioweapons. It’s not hard to get your hands on secondhand lab equipment…

The AI crowd has been working for multile decades and only now has made progress that people care about. Also I’m pretty sure the “eye-watering amounts of money” Sam Altman referred to exceed what developers of even the crypto projects had, when they built eg Bitcoin or Ethereum. That’s what it took to make AI turn heads. Until AlphaGo you could also yell that AI has no real applications.

The personal computer crowd had hobbyists like Wozniak coming to meetups for decades and computers were the province of nerds, now everyone is addicted to them. Decades took place

You are like a person yelling at the video game industry: “pong and space invaders are a stupid waste of time with ugly graphics!! Don’t play or make video games!!” Until a few decades later we have Halo, Call of Duty etc.