If you are an AI-doomster, then this is a tragedy of the commons.
“AI for All” is the most ambitious industrial policy bet Seoul has made in a generation. Lee has backed a handful of domestic consortia to build a sovereign Korean model, and during the summit, the presidential office announced semiconductor supply and production partnerships between US and South Korean firms worth a combined US$950 billion over five years…
The country established an AI Safety Institute (AISI), and the legislation sets a compute threshold that designates high-performance systems for additional safety duties and imposes risk management obligations across ten “high-impact” domains, including energy, healthcare, hiring, public services and nuclear operations.
Maybe, South Korea has chosen to stop dithering and praying it all will somehow turn out OK, and instead to “damn the torpedoes full speed ahead” to encounter the problem democratically and with eyes wide open.
Underneath the AI threat is the almost never spoken of threat from radical changes in human sociology during my own lifetime. A part of human evolutionary success has been of social rather than strictly biological evolution — e.g. the way village life and urban neighborhood streets trained people, primarily when children, in honesty, loyalty, endurance, and other critical virtues. That is now dead or near dead in too many places. Democracy dies without civil virtue, and civil virtue is not automatic, but now almost forgotten.