>then work your brain on the activities you actually enjoy.

1. As seen in this coountry, most people did not in fact "pursue physical activities they enjoyed". They got much less healthy and then the white collar machines started to churn their brains too. I do not see this ending any differently.

2. As many have noted (and has been known for decades pre-AI), getting more work done in a modern workplace does not reward you with more of your time back. It gives you more work and higher velocity plans. It may even end up compensating you less. There's only more benefit to this if you are your own boss, and so far a lot of those kinds of people are simply selling grifts, not truly disrupting the industry with newfound efficiencies.

>but we can't force the world to technologically regress just because some people are lazy and don't exercise

I didn't want to go too off topic, but since this is such a sticking point I need to make a big note about the US: most of the world is more sedentary than 100 years ago. But the obesity epidemic is mostly US-cerntric.

Which shows that, while we can't force a diet, we can definitely regulate incentives. But the US chose not to. We had all kinds of initatives to try and regulate what we put in our food and what to subsidize. We instead said corporations can do whatever we want and subsidized chemicals that are heavily taxes or banned in many other western countries.

I know that's a scary word for this community, but this analog of regulations can work here in AI as well. We don't need to ban AI (but I'm not opposed to it in primary schools), but we can shape policy to prevent "corporations can do whatever they want" yet again.

>we can definitely regulate incentives.

We can't regulate incentives. Unless we can somehow go back to how the world was in the 1960s, the incentive today in a global competitive world economy, is to make more money than your economic rivals, otherwise if you only regulate yourself but if they don't, then they will economically dominate you in the long run and turn your government into their puppet, your country into their playground and your people in their sweatshop workers. It's economic neo-colonilism 2.0 electric boogaloo.

Regulations only work if all players in the world adhere to them, but history has proven they don't. They expect everyone else to adhere to the rules and slow down so that they can get ahead of you.

> But the US chose not to

Smart. Then US can be the survivor in this global race. As someone in the EU I am aware of more top EU-born tech companies relocating their offices/R&D to the US than vice versa.

> but we can shape policy to prevent "corporations can do whatever they want" yet again.

I fully agree. But again, this will work if all major nations regulate AI equally, otherwise, AI corporations will move where they have more freedom.