Thank you.
One thing I'd say is that the world is very large and, unfortunately, we're allowed to have many problems at once. We're allowed to have the problem of pressing regulatory issues with artificial intelligence and to have to worry about the trajectory of the technology and where it's going.
As for your question about people in the past who were worried about various past general-purpose technologies, I would agree that many of the people who warned about the risks were wrong about the impacts, but some of them were right sometimes. It turned out that nuclear weapons were real. They're very catastrophic, and we treat them very differently from the Internet. For many technologies, though, yes, there are people who are always going to create a big stir about them.
General-purpose, very powerful artificial intelligence systems are different in a real sense. Having a system that's not just automating a particular cognitive task or a particular physical task but is doing the type of thinking we would be doing, or something similar to it, such that it could automate the process of automation is different in kind. It should be treated as different in kind.
I heard in your question that there is some speculation about when it will come and what its effects will be. Technological progress and forecasting in that domain are notoriously hard. I agree. That said, it certainly seems that when we look at the history of the field and how much trouble we've had developing this technology.... Even back then, the people who founded the field, Alan Turing and I.J. Good, were already imagining what it would look like if they succeeded. They were already thinking about these risks and what it would take to control a system that is much smarter than we are. I think something has changed in the trajectory of that technology, which I can speak to, and that means we should be thinking about it coming much sooner than we otherwise thought.