The author is still grieving by watching a civilisation changing technology just passing by. Every single one of the problems they note applies to any technology that existed.

The internet produced 4chan. Produced scammers. Produced fraud. Instrumental in spreading child porn. Caused suicides. Many people lost their lives due to bullying on the internet. Many develop have addictions to gaming.

To anyone who has given it some thought, any sufficiently advanced technology usually affects both in good and bad ways. Its obvious that something that increases degrees of freedom in one direction will do so in others. Humans come in and align it.

There's some social credit to gain by being cynical and by signalling this cynicism. In the current social dynamics - being cynical gives you an edge and makes you look savvy. The optimistic appear naive but the pessimists appear as if they truly understand the situation. But the optimists are usually correct in hindsight.

We know how the internet turned out despite pessimists flagging potential problems with it. I know how AI will turn out. These kind of articles will be a dime a dozen and we will look at it the same way as we look at now at bygone internet-pessimists.

This is response not just to this article, but a few others.