My favorite one that I’ve heard is: “ban it”. This has a lot of problems… let’s say despite the billions of dollars of lobbyists already telling Congress what a great thing AI is every day, that you manage to make AI, or however you define the latest scary tech, punishable by death in the USA.

Then what happens? There are already AI companies in other countries busily working away. Even the folks that are very against AI would at least recognize some limited use cases. Over time the USA gets left behind in whatever the end results of the appearance of AI on the economy.

If you want to see a parallel to this, check out Japan’s reaction when the rest of the world came knocking on their doorstep in the 1600s. All that scary technology, banned. What did it get them? Stalled out development for quite a while, and the rest of the world didn’t sit still either. A temporary reprieve.

The more aggressive of you will say, this is no problem, let’s push for a worldwide ban. Good luck with that. For almost any issue on Earth, I’m not sure we have total alignment. The companies displaced from the USA would end up in some other country and be even more determined not to get shut down.

AI is here. It’s like electricity. You can not wire your house but that just leads to you living in a cabin in the woods while your neighbors have running water, heat, air conditioning and so on.

The question shouldn’t be, how do we get rid of it? How do we live without it? It should be, how can we co-exist with it? What’s the right balance? The genie isn’t going back in the bottle, no matter how hard you wish.