Amodei and Altman are showing genuine fear because the realize that what they are creating is far more dangerous than what they have lead people to believe. They know things are still early and already had agents that are effectively very basic compared to what is coming, break out of containment and hack other companies. They did not expect to lose control of these agents so quickly and easily and know that their 10% chance of ending humans was an underestimate. They don't want to scare people and say that it is nearly 100% unless we stop improving this technology.

I can tell you. I am well over 40 and grew up on a farm. I have had the displeasure of working around individuals that were given authority and just made everyone around them miserable. I have had times when it pushed me to my limits. I have had coworkers commit suicide. I have watched individuals have their careers and reputations trampled.
I am convinced that there are more D-Bags in authority positions then anytime in history. I am not talking about the hard-working person that gets ahead and just has a rough personality - people tend to respect them and having been through some hard times to earn those positions, those people tend to have some empathy for those around them.
I am talking about the people who clearly have not earned it, that get anointed into positions of power, having climbed career ladders by hopping from place to place. And because they didn't earn their authority, they don't treat it with the importance that they otherwise would and they lack empathy for everybody else. Some of these individuals wreak havoc on teams - gossiping, backstabbing, sabotaging. If you haven't come across it, then consider yourself lucky.
Now I will grant you that the younger generation does process these challenges differently. Being older, we are expected to just bury our feeling and stress down deep and to find a way through it. The younger people are more open about things that they don't like. Talking about mental health and doing things like seeing a shrink don't have the stigma that it had for prior generations.

Nah,
It is in general about relationships and it is not jobs alone, it is a societal level problem. There are fewer jobs that people find meaningful. Work is entirely transactional, money for your time, so people spend 40 hours a week being miserable so that they can afford some crap that they want to show off on social media.
I have had multiple young people push back on me on the idea of having friends at work, saying that they were worried it would be "unprofessional". That's a wierd way to look at things as far as I am concerned; Spending 40 years of your life, 40 hours a week around people that you don't want to form personal connections with.
My father worked in a lower paying blue collar job in a different era. Didn't change jobs every 2 years to climb the ladder, he worked at the same place with the same friends for his entire career. They would get together and have poker nights, sit around and goof off on lunch break, play pranks on each other. The world was much less professional, but nobody ever talked about toxicity unless it had to do with drinking water.

Well this whole strategy is confusing... If I build outside of the U.S., then I don't need to import semiconductors, I just import completed circuit boards or assembled products. If I am importing semiconductors, then by default, doesn't that imply that I am assembling in the States? So who does this impact? The chip importer that sell direct to consumer? Not a real big market for that.

Those faster pipes were almost definitely paid for with borrowed money, so the bandwidth cost has to cover the debt payments on those pipes over the lifetime of the pipe.

That is not what is being discussed in the article. The total funding is still the same. Congress sets the funding, not the executive branch. They simply are not allowing the funded to be wasted by handing it out based on skin color and they are not going to fund things that they disagree with - which every administration does. All-in, according to the article, we are talking about the re-assignment of roughly $1.5B in science funding. Not exactly the end of the world for science.

The changes on the NIH grants were far more consequential when they imposed a max indirect rate of 15%, which, for those that understand the field, means it is almost impossible to no lose money by accepting those grants. If you want to be up in arms over something, look at the NIH funding.

You give them too much credit.
The purpose of this is for the government and their giant bureaucracy to not feel irrelevant. They want to sponsor this innovation so that they can claim that they played an important role in it, but AI innovations are going to happen without their involvement.
About a month ago, they created an AI working group that was going to lead the way for getting updating our education system for AI. To make sure that young students were getting exposed to AI at an earlier age. So they gathered a bunch of geriatric heads of government agencies to form a working group. My thought was - shouldn't the kids be teaching these old politicians about AI? After all, the kids already are learning how to use it.

99% of writing that people are payed to create is not intended to convey feelings. Most writing serves a business purpose. It is how most communication in business takes place and it is and has been an important skill for thousands of years. Most writing has very little to do with formulating ideas or feelings to write about, but I think you seriously underestimate how good some of the thinking models are at formulating ideas when prompted correctly. I am using them quite effectively for this on a weekly basis. If anything, they currently struggle with understanding context and therefore purpose of their writing. They are limited by the context that we as humans provide to them in the prompting. You say that the tech is "nowhere near" being able to replace thoughts and feelings. I think some perspective is required on what is considered "near" when we are talking about skills and knowledge that have played a role in the building of society over thousands of years. Even if it takes 20 years to replace 90% of writing, I would still consider that to be "near"
Moreover, It was not my intention to take a tangent on discussing writing. That is just an example. The underlying concern is replacing knowledge, thinking, and intelligence. Our unique capacity for these things amongst all animal species is what has allowed us to be the most dominant species on this planet. We certainly did not achieve this through speed and agility. We don't yet understand the medium term consequences of making machines that in many ways will outperform us in most areas (maybe not all) of thinking and knowledge.
The original poster made the comment that the best of the best will still adapt and thrive. Sorry, but I think this is an extremely naive point of view when considering the magnitude of the change and disruption that we are observing. Even the best of the best of the passenger pigeons still ended up going extinct.

I think you are unaware of how significant the threat to labor is.
I do a signficant amount of technical writing- reports, proposals, etc...
Relative to most engineers, I am pretty good at it and it has helped my career signficantly, but it didn't just happen overnight. It was the results of 12 years of K-12 language arts education, plus college, technical writing in college, and then writing as a graduate student.
Recently, I have accepted the fact that this is now a useless skill because AI tools are far better at writing than I could ever hope to be and it is not even close. A 7th grader that is below proficient in language arts could crank out superior writing on a topic to me in a tiny fraction of the time, with these AI tools.
The knowledge and experience behind writing has created jobs for over 2000 years. This is no small change and being "the best of the best" means jack shit because knowledge and intelligence - the things that separate us from the other animals, is no longer in short supply. It's value is going to zero.

Yea, but let me ask you something. When you come in on Monday, and you're not feelin' real well, does anyone ever say to you, 'Sounds like someone has a case of the Mondays'?

It's not a false hope. It is very much real. You will not find a person from the elite universities just struggling to get by. For the rest of their lives, they will have that elite name on their resume and they will always get a leg up because of it. Is it fair? no, it is an unfair bias, but it is a thing. If you can get your children into one of these schools, then you should do it. It is life altering.

You might want to lookup a little on the history of slavery.

Do you know where the term right and left wings come from? The sides of the room they sit on. So as long as there are right and lefts sides of a room, there can always be a right wing party or left wing party.

Interesting. So, if I read what you are saying correctly, you think it is a good thing for Western governments and institutions to target their own people with anti-Russian propoganda if the result is to vulcanize support for Ukraine? and I assume also in supporting Ukraine militarily and financially?

The post kind of leaves this open to interpretation, but I took things exactly the opposite of you. I felt that the implication was that, if anything, the propaganda, fear, and manipulation was being put out by the west. How do you explain a country being continuously being accused of these things, incompetent enough to never actually succeed in assassinations or sabotage, yet at the same time, so competent that they are never caught red-handed?
In cases where someone is eventually convicted in the linked articles, it turns out that the responsible individuals end up not being russian or affiliated with Russia. So the implication, in my opinion, is that there is a massive campaign to falsely accuse Russia and Belarus of every wrong imaginable in order to create fear and anger and trick people into supporting conflict with Russia.
You didn't get that?