Personally if I could Thanos-snap AI out of existence I would, but as long as it exists, it seems better on balance to make good use of it where possible than just try to ignore it.

"Focusing more on AI stuff" ... not really? Of course I was using AI a lot in my work at Google, as well as contributing to AI acceleration. Now I won't be contributing to acceleration and I can be as cautious as I want to be about using it.

Instagram? Tiktok? Facebook?

Social media feeds off addiction to generate ad revenue.

And how much damage has social media done to political and social institutions and to collective mental health?

Ads on other web properties are not weaponised in the same way.

Advertising has become 'active', very recently in the overall lifespan of advertising. For most of it's lifespan it was passive, it blared out at you from the TV or radio or bus stop. Now, however, it's reaching out and taking pieces of you back for analysis and reconstruction, and on-selling to any other entity interested in doing the same.

The reason is greed, yes.

We can't regulate human greed, but we can regulate the manifestation of its symptoms.

We can also choose not to work towards expanding the capacity of said symptoms.

On the other hand you have pure speculation.

Not only that, AI has been immensely liberating/empowering for many ordinary people (That's why these AI companies have millions of users).

I suppose yeah... It's just greed and corruption.

The incentive structures are wrong/poor/malignant

That is a threat to the fundamental stability of society.

AI is concerning in some aspects, yes, but the loss of a shared reality has nothing to do with that, and is even more scary.

Even before big money was on the table, people didn’t blink an eye at starting to work for Google/Facebook, “solving fun tasks.”

I think it's worse than that. Or at least, the products that have been built because of advertising are worse than that. Instagram/TikTok/Facebook are all ultimately just surfaces to serve ads, but they've wormed their way into their users' consciousness in fairly insidious ways

My two older and more theoretically oriented children I am not sure what to recommend so I let them find something they are interested in mostly on their own.

A lot of my comments get responses that assume I'm an "AI booster" but what I really am is someone highly motivated to understand the capabilities and limits of this technology, because it is already very directly impacting the future of my kids.

What I tell my kids is a function of what I believe the future holds: nobody will be doing low-level cognitive work anymore, it will all be done by AI, so our job is to be better than AI. Unfortunately:

a) Low-level cognitive work is like (SWAG) 80% of all knowledge work, and so more than 80% of jobs are effectively gone, they just don't know it yet.

b) AI is getting really good really fast so that 80% is also growing quickly.

That means that the days of doing a junior-to-mid level job, kind of just coasting along -- often until retirement -- are gone. Everybody has to be good enough to be doing the top 20% of cognitive work, which involves fuzzy things we call innovation, expertise, domain knowledge, intuition, taste, handling uncertainty, and the like.

So my advice to my kids is:

1. Whatever you do, be the BEST at it, regardless of grades. Grades already meant little, now they mean even less. Being the best likely also necessitates strategic avoidance of AI, but I'm willing to be proven wrong on that.

2. Be "high agency". Annoying buzzword but perfectly captures the trait everybody will be hiring for. The 80% of the jobs were those doing the drudgework for the 20% "high agency" people calling the shots. And those are the exact jobs that are gone. Just do things, because now you can.

3. Critical thinking may soon be the only job requirement remaining. Get bullet-proof at that and learn relevant skills (maybe data literacy?)

I'm also encouraging trade school, but that seems less attractive to the kids.

I'm not saying skip college just yet, but we do intend to aggressively "value-maxx" college education (e.g. community college) and focus on building something, anything, practical -- since showing what you've built is better than degrees from most colleges.

In the old testament God was hard and judging heartless, killing his creation through flood, wanting sacrifices, killed 1st borns, leveled two whole cities Sodom and Ghomora, and was in general an hardhearted God that you should fear.

People are using AI.

Your argument is that AI cannot be a serious concern because it has major known limitations. But most of us are using it despite the major known limitations. So the existence of the known limitations is irrelevant to determining what level of harms are possible -- unless the known limitations are directly limiting the harms. In practice, it seems like most current harms, and many of the (not stupid) feared harms, are completely possible despite the known limitations. Sometimes even exacerbated by them. ("Sorry, you told me to never stop your insulin pump, but I stopped your insulin pump while diagnosing a test failure. I will record in my memory file that I must always... hello? user?")

The (not stupid) parenthetical might be too weaselly for you, but that's how I see the "AI is going to rise up and intentionally subjugate or exterminate humanity" brand of doomerism. While I don't think that's strictly impossible, there are so many other ways harms that are much more imminent and much harder to defend against, that it seems foolish (to me!) to worry about those.

If you can stop a problem by pulling out the plug, you don't have a real problem.

If you don't want to pull out the plug, you do have a real problem. (Don't want, or can't afford to, or can't be bothered to so extremely that you never will, or whatever.)

Trope circa 1950 not true, because of trope circa even earlier...

Whatever AI people have been saying for the last 70 years, AI capabilities have improved stupendously in the last 10 years and there is no sign of the rate of improvement slowing down. I would like to deny it, but I can't.

But nothing would make me more happy than knowing that there are concerned people acting internally.