Oh right. I didn’t mean to say I think it needs regulation. I meant to say that I can imagine conservative people feeling threatened by this. Not saying they should, because I agree. It is limited and the real uses of GPT are quite a bit more subtle than “do everything for me” and it all needs to diffuse into society for a while. Which will probably take longer than we techies imagine it.

Edit: I do think there is a slight difference from your example here. Trucks are already here and driving them is a known thing and it is easy to see how it could work (making it work is still hard). Automating cognition itself is automating a nearly unknown skill. Nobody quite knows what it is we are doing and what box we are opening.

> But now you're asking the government to regulate against a hypothetical damage that may never occur.

That is entirely reasonable ask, especially when the harm could be large. It's a lot harder (and often impossible) to put a genie back in a bottle once it's out.

> I remember having the exact same discussions on HN about autonomous vehicles over a decade ago. The consensus then was that autonomous vehicles would make truck and taxi drivers obsolete within 5 years, and that this massive, sudden loss of jobs would cause a lot of social unrest.

So some internet commenters' schedule was wrong, but that doesn't mean the bigger point was wrong. Some people thought we'd die in a nuclear war in the 80s, and they'd still be prescient if it turns out we die in on in the 2030s.

Technologists tend to be pathologically optimistic about technology, and tend to hand wave away the problems it will cause. It's important to keep that attitude in check, because they sure as hell don't seem to have the wisdom to do it themselves.