Seth Lazar in Aeon:
Much of the attention being paid to generative AI systems has focused on how they replicate the pathologies of already widely deployed AI systems, arguing that they centralise power and wealth, ignore copyright protections, depend on exploitative labour practices, and use excessive resources. Other critics highlight how they foreshadow vastly more powerful future systems that might threaten humanity’s survival. The first group says there is nothing new here; the other looks through the present to a perhaps distant horizon.
I want instead to pay attention to what makes these particular systems distinctive: both their remarkable scientific achievement, and the most likely and consequential ways in which they will change society over the next five to 10 years.
More here.