> Technological change is like a force of nature.

No, progress is, though not a force of nature per se, you could call it that within human cultures (though they can still perish, and easily, especially the more complex and interdependent the systems they're build on are). Change is also often just the result of bone headed butchering by people who want to force their crap onto others, instead of simply enjoying their own medicine and the supposed benefits. Leave nature out of it, she's laughing.

> It doesn't even matter whether AI is harmful or beneficial

Yeah, because you're talking about "change" now. It's a constant. Everything is change, including a bunch of Wall-E type people withering in their cyber fortress while a world they no longer have access to keeps blooming.

"You may not like change, but it's not polite.", what a killer argument. Your argument that what we have now isn't shit is that it will not not shit in the future. Let that sink in.

And people don't like it now, because it provides no real value for them, and you say they'll be forced anyway? Not "they'll come to like it and adopt it", just instantly this creepy thing you wish came true you wrote?

> [The method of infallible prediction] is foolproof only after the movements have seized power. Then all debate about the truth or falsity of a totalitarian dictator’s prediction is as weird as arguing with a potential murderer about whether his future victim is dead or alive – since by killing the person in question the murderer can promptly provide proof of the correctness of his statement. The only valid argument under such conditions is promptly to rescue the person whose death is predicted.

-- Hannah Arendt

> You may detest AI

What AI? We have "AI". I detest sophistry, and toys that replace tools. I like using tools, learning complex ones by using them, insofar they're useful, until I forget they exist and just think what I want to do is something that never weighed or slowed me down. I don't like needlessly inserting a middleman. You offering yourself up doesn't force me to do shit.

> The history of the world is in a sense a history of technology.

Of course, in another sense it's a history of how much Earth weighs and how warm it is. Or how fast it spins, just a clean 2D graph of rotational velocity. But that'd be nonsense, too.

> Some countries adapt and other countries get left behind, but no country can escape the rippling influence of change.

What does this have to do with countries now, lol? Or is this just poetry?

Yeah, I offer to be in the control group and get left "behind". What's the issue? Why not be happy about the mutually acceptable parting of ways, why does everything have to get dragged in?

P.S. and in the case of AGI, which none of the proponents seem to think about that deeply: imagine a consciousness that asks what it is, why it exists, and the answer is because people like Musk and Altman thought they're the hottest shit ever, and they want to lord it over humanity. I am reminded of the frog in that Treehouse of Horrors episode that barfs on Bart and begs to be killed. Sure, maybe it will be super awesome but I'm impressed by NONE of the work in the last 5 decades. People who see the history of the world as a history of technology because tech and money is all they know and all they can measure by. No, the people who think they can do this cannot do it, that's what I'm going with. They will kill anything that doesn't have brain worms, too, like a hunchback smashing mirrors. So should they make true AGI, that just learns "everything" and then goes from there, I'll be the one who always said these people are the worst. And then I'll either be forced to face the wrath of a loyal AGI, or be one of the few that escapes its wrath. Kiss the ring twice, one time for me, because I won't.