Let's be more specific about how and why this could happen? What scenarios could lead to the total destruction of mankind?

Well, one scenario is letting the hype get ahead of the capabilities, and do the 'AI store' experiment, but for real with responsibility for something actually important.

Another is that it is far easier to just screw things up than it is to make things work. I may not have it in me to make a house of cards, yet I can trivially even accidentally destroy a house of cards someone else built without a whiff of understanding.

The assessment of the capabilities based on bottom line certainly is subjective, which is precisely why Jensen Huang is so aggressively gung-ho about we must do everything we possibly can to spend more money on nvidia stuff. The motivation for Anthrophic seems either they have legitimate concerns or are looking to rationalize a plateau after promising the world. It certainly doesn't serve their bottom line to slow down otherwise.

Of the big players, I'd say OpenAI is at the biggest risk of not really able to even stumble straight ahead, presuming stumbling/charging straight ahead is in the cards for the companies in general.

Actually I'd probably not be too interested in an unspecified new tech, as with things *that* open ended I end up stuck in a demo of some sort of warehouse inventory management software. Thinking back to the people that got all excited for the 'IT' product and then the massive letdown when it turned out to be a scooter.

I would have to at least know a more specific area to figure out if I'm going to get excited or not. The mere rarity/exclusivity of an experience doesn't hold much appeal to me.

I'm not a film festival sort of guy, but in analogous cons that would hold my interest, I can't imagine an event being so vague and getting my attention for the one event. I feel like I'd not want to risk my limited convention time on such an unkwnown, unless it at least had some familiar facet that was known.

I could not imagine giving up three hours to watch something I have *zero* idea about, not even genre.

Show me when we *ever* built significant 'double decker' freeways? We have, obviously, been willing to build, rebuild and expand roads beyond what we had before. The problem is that we are seeing diminishing returns for our efforts. We give up more and more resources and land and get less and less benefit out of it. We expand 3 lanes to 4 and after tolerating *years* of even worse traffic to facilitate construction and then it opens up and... still jammed up because an additional lane didn't help *that* much. The problems aren't solved by more lanes, and more new roads means lots of people lose their property to serve the attempt.

There are other areas where I think you have a point. For example we somehow had the will to build out electricity and telephone to reach the middle of nowhere, but when you say we should build out fiber in the same way, it's just not affordable. But we have consistently been all about throwing more at roads, and have way more and better roads than we have *ever* had, but they just don't work as well with scale.

Actually, from what I've read broadly George Lucas' work was really only decent by virtue of everyone else kind of fixing it up around him. Which is a prime example of some critical mass of human involvement being useful to refine creative outcomes.

It's about the authors rather than GenAI.

Previous advances brought down costs and accelerated production, but things were still specifically deliberate choices by humans.

This stuff allows a mediocre short prompt generate significant chunks of content without human care.

The human care that serves to generally add quality now becomes an impediment to speed and volume of content.

You can still have that care applied with GenAI, but that gets drowned out by the low effort crap.

Content discovery is hard when drowning in crap content. Finding a needle in a haystack is rough.

Problem is that won't happen.

The fundamental issue is that a GenAI user that pumps out whatever the GenAI does without review will be tons faster than the GenAI user that actually cares, reviews, edits, and reworks the output.

This flips things upside down, someone with dedication under the traditional ways would produce more, now dedication and care become a liability. Accepting a bland paste of garbage from the AI is easier to produce content than trying to implement actual creative content.

Why would he have to make a car to have an opinion? That argument is generally a "well there's nothing better on the market, so if you know better, clearly you can do better", except here pretty much *everyone* is doing it better by having a wheel except Zoox.

Even Zoox at least gets *something* for skipping the steering wheel: more passenger volume and ability to face each other. The Tesla concept is a two-seater for zero benefit.

That awkwardly addresses one minor facet of a 27 page manual for one car model for emergency situations, and this is the Model Y variant that can be traditionally operated.

Fun fact, those documents apply to the Model Y, and does not answer the question about how the car gets manually moved because that question is still obvious because the car has a steering wheel.

But even without that, they are expecting first responders to deal with 27 pages of material over their snowflake and also directs the first responder that they must call Tesla along with everything else.

While they *can* move a car that cannot be steered on it's own, they generally prefer not to resort to it. It takes longer and requires more equipment. It's unavoidable if an accident messes up the steering or drive of the car badly enough, but even in pretty significant wrecks, they will frequently steer it. When someone totaled my car so badly the door was stuck and I had to climb through the window, they still drove it out of the way, and then onto the flatbed.

The "no steering wheel even possible" is a needless way to signal your overconfidence in the tech. Rarely requiring the wheel may be a feature, removing the wheel is just stupid.

Sure, mock him now, but you'll not be laughing when SpaceX sorts out the time machine that he had been secretly baking into his predictions all along.