Freddie on the fantastical prophecies of the AI true believers:

So this is what I would say to Read and others who are trying to skate the line of being AI skeptic skeptics without being full-on deranged maximalists: you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives in a world that would be almost totally recognizable to people living in the year 2000, a world that functions more or less the same way our world has functioned for the duration of our entire lives, with an economy that is not structurally much different from the same one we’ve always known. There will be jobs, and there will be cancer, and any missions to Mars will be fundamentally scientific endeavors that do not promise any economic return at all. No human being alive today will make it to 150 years old, not even the youngest infants; any asteroid mining that occurs will be a gimmick and will be a net money loser by a vast margin. Nothing in the world of medicine will happen that will come close to matching the improvements in health and longevity that were achieved in the 20th century, when the boring mundane advances of routine handwashing, antibiotics, and vaccines saved lives by the tens of millions. More and more often, you’ll get around in self-driving cars. And that will be cool. Traffic fatalities will decline. But we won’t live to see a world where human-driven cars are banned—you can’t technology your way out of a political problem, and if you think getting Americans to give up their guns is hard, just wait until you see how they cling to their cars. And, you know. Cars are just cars.