> Every frontier tech company is convinced that the tech they are working towards is as humanity-useful as a cure for cancer, and yet as dangerous as nuclear weapons.

Maybe some of the more naive engineers think that. At this point any big tech businesses or SV startup saying they're in it to usher in some piece of the Star Trek utopia deserves to be smacked in the face for insulting the rest of us like that. The argument is always "well the economic incentive structure forces us to do this bad thing, and if we don't we're screwed!" Oh, so ideals so shallow you aren't willing to risk a tiny fraction of your billions to meet them. Cool.

Every AI company/product in particular is the smarmiest version of this. "We told all the blue collar workers to go white collar for decades, and now we're coming for all the white collar jobs! Not ours though, ours will be fine, just yours. That's progress, what are you going to do? You'll have to renegotiate the entire civilizational social contract. No we aren't going to help. No we aren't going to sacrifice an ounce of profit. This is a you problem, but we're being so nice by warning you! Why do you want to stand in the way of progress? What are you a Luddite? We're just saying we're going to take away your ability to pay your mortgage/rent, deny any kids you have a future, and there's nothing you can do about it, why are you anti-progress?"

Cynicism aside, I use LLMs to the marginal degree that they actually help me be more productive at work. But at best this is Web 3.0. The broader "AI vision" really needs to die