Right. The point is that in frothy market conditions and a general low-integrity regime in business and politics there is a ton of incentive to exploit FOMO far beyond it's already "that's a stiff sip there" potency and this leads to otherwise sane and honest people getting caught up into doing concrete things today based on total speculation about technology that isn't even proposed yet. A good way to really understand this intuitively is to take the present-day intellectual and emotional charge out of it without loss of generality: we can go back and look at Moore's Law for example, and the history of how the sausage got made on reconciling a prediction of exponential growth with the realities of technological advance. It's a fascinating history, there's at least one great book [1] and the Asionometry YouTube documentary series on it is great as always [2].

There is no point in doing business and politics and money motivated stuff based on the hypothetical that technology will become self-improving, if that happens we're through the looking glass, not in Kansas anymore, "Roads? Where we're going, we won't need roads." It won't matter or at least it won't be what you think it'll be some crazy thing.

Much, much, much, much more likely is that this is like all the other times we made some real progress, people got too excited, some shady people made some money, and we all sobered up and started working on the next milestone. This is by so far both A) The only scenario you can do anything about and B) The only scenario honest experts take seriously, so it's a double "plan for this one".

The quiet ways that Jetson Orin devices and shit will keep getting smarter and more trustworthy to not break shit and stuff, that's the bigger story, it will make a much bigger difference than snazzy Google that talks back, but it's taking time and appearing in the military first and comes in fits and starts and has all the other properties of ya know, reality.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Moores-Law-Silicon-Valleys-Revolution...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/@Asianometry

Shocking how incomplete this article is. One of the prominent sites was caused by Fairchild, and it's specifically described in Gordon Moore's autobiography. he said they just dumped strong acids down the drain, unaware that it ate a hole in the drainpipe, and so all the other solvents they dumped down the same drain ended up hitting the water table and pluming (https://www.amazon.com/Moores-Law-Silicon-Valleys-Revolution...).

he claims he didn't know that would happen, but every trained chemist learns to neutralize their acids before dumping them down the drain.

AFAICT, Moore and his buddies never had to pay anything for this- the companies settled with the government.