Thoughtful essay — and this is the core question. I recently listened to an interview with Geoffrey Hinton, regarded as the godfather of AI, on The New Yorker's "The Political Scene" podcast. Hinton has been a leading researcher in AI pretty much since its infancy, and he's frankly terrified. He thinks the horse has already left the barn far behind, and attempts to limit or delay AI's development are already too little and too late — as he says, absolutely no one expected it to accelerate anywhere near as fast as it has and continues to. He's convinced that the best we can do as humans is to figure out how to contend with AI as we go — and hope it doesn't decide we're irrelevant, or worse.