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.
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.