The AI skeptics tend to focus only on flaws:

Some of the things AI did do in 2024:

He concludes that:

There have been many responses to Newton, perhaps the most interesting is Benjamin Riley who provides a comprehensive overview of the types of AI skepticism and the people involved: Who and What comprise AI Skepticism?

The key economic effect of AI is that it makes capital a more and more general substitute for labour. There's less need to pay humans for their time to perform work, because you can replace that with capital. (e.g. data centres running software replaces a human doing mental labour).

As jobs get replaced, the State will have to enact UBI but what lifestyle will it support? Currently the State looks after citizens because they make the State strong. This incentive could go away after AGI.

With labour-replacing AI, the incentives of states—in the sense of what actions states should take to maximise their competitiveness against other states and/or their own power—will no longer be aligned with humans in this way. The incentives might be better than during feudalism. During feudalism, the incentive was to extract as much as possible from the peasants without them dying. After labour-replacing AI, humans will be less a resource to be mined and more just irrelevant. However, spending fewer resources on humans and more on the AIs that sustain the state's competitive advantage will still be incentivised.

Sufficiently strong AI could make entrepreneurship and startups obsolete.

VC funds might be able to directly convert money into hundreds of startup attempts all run by AIs, without having to go through the intermediate route of finding a human entrepreneurs to manage the AIs for them.

This means AI is the main driver of wealth and will eliminate upward mobility in society.

In a worse case, AI trillionaires have near-unlimited and unchecked power, and there's a permanent aristocracy that was locked in based on how much capital they had at the time of labour-replacing AI. The power disparities between classes might make modern people shiver, much like modern people consider feudal status hierarchies grotesque. But don't worry—much like the feudal underclass mostly accepted their world order due to their culture even without superhumanly persuasive AIs around, the future underclass will too.

It could be a dire future; however, you don’t need to wait for the default outcome to unfold, you can shape how it unfolds.

But it's also true that right now is a great time to do something ambitious. Robin Hanson calls the present "the dreamtime", following a concept in Aboriginal myths: the time when the future world order and its values are still liquid, not yet set in stone.

These robots captivated audiences with demonstrations ranging from industrial training scenarios to increasingly versatile commercial applications. Visitors were treated to interactive and entertaining displays, such as robots fetching medicine, playing the piano, washing clothes, and making coffee.

The Illinois Senate has approved a clean energy deal which includes a subsidy for Exelon to keep the Byron nuclear plant in operation, after the House passed it last week. The plan gives Exelon $694 million to keep the Byron and Dresden plants operational. Exelon had previously begun drawing down the Byron plant with an anticipated retirement date of Monday, September 13th, and had warned that once the nuclear fuel had been depleted, it could not be refueled after that date. Exelon said Monday that with the passage of the bill, it was preparing to refuel both plants.

With the urgency of the climate crisis more clear than ever, no nuclear plant should be closed prematurely while coal plants continue operation in the same state. Many celebrated the Senate move, however, others have criticized Exelon's actions.

“Exelon first started what we’ve dubbed the nuclear hostage crisis. It’s a pattern where a utility will for whatever reasons threaten closure, which gets the workers very upset, then the local community whose tax base depends on it gets upset, they pressure their legislators, and then the legislators grant bailouts,” said Dave Kraft, head of the Nuclear Energy Information Service.