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I agree but I see a lot of very concrete harms too. It's been catastrophic for schools, the sloppification of the web has been largely a disaster so far, it's been a disaster for cybersecurity, it's wreaked havoc on the consumer electronics market, it's driven a lot of financial and existential insecurity for students and early career people across various roles, and while I'm not as militant about data centers as some I think their proliferation has been a net negative environmentally (including increased reliance on coal).

Well, we have a good understanding of the benefits that the industrial revolution and the computing revolution have given us.

The AI situation is different. The technology is obviously extraordinarily powerful but the benefits to humanity are still nebulous and there are many very obvious harms like the one we're discussing. So to describe yourself as "aggressively pro AI" you must believe that future, as-yet unrealized benefits will outweigh the harms. I don't think that's a crazy thing to believe but it deserves scrutiny and demands elaboration.

Maybe, maybe not. The older I get the less I agree with your point of view. As a rank and file employee, your time horizon is much longer than your tenure at your current company, it's the length of your whole career. All it takes is one very good outcome, and how you behave and perform at your current job will impact how many opportunities you get in the future. Some of my best coworkers from ten years ago are now sitting on eight or nine figure equity packages at the big AI labs. You want to position yourself to get those opportunities yourself.

Maybe in some other subjects. Not in mathematics. When I did my math degree a large amount of the learning came via doing problem sets and this was a very common experience among other students too.

I also want a robust public transit system. Happy now? :)

>I feel like the article is trying really hard to be cynical

I don't feel this way at all. I think you are reading it through the lens of your own personal feelings about Waymo.

I think the article is trying really hard to present a mix of positives and negatives, a "balanced" perspective. Things like talking about how some women feel safer without having to worry about a driver (positive), yet sharing a story of a woman who felt less safe from her fellow passenger because there was no driver (negative). Mentioning the story of the cat that was killed in SF (negative), but also mentioning that human drivers kill a great deal of cats too (positive, in a sense). And so on.

>Pretty much the entire city of Paris caps out at 7 stories.

And despite that, Paris is one of the densest cities in the world, and an incredibly pleasant place to live. This should be a good lesson to everyone that "high density" does not have to be synonymous with reams of skyscrapers.

That makes no sense. The most expensive property in the world is in high density cities.

Personally I want no traffic but also little parking. Car infrastructure is a general blight on public spaces.