Yes, and the worst part of it is we did it to ourselves.
It was only through our inability to organize and correct destructive behavior that we have gotten to this point today. Our inability to recognize and combat corruption, and the deceit of managed truth.
When the intelligent are stripped of agency, and the unintelligent and delusional rule. These are the outcomes for all the warnings that have gone unacted upon for at least half a century.
The assumptions and implications put forth in those two statements have no basis in reality and are easily contradicted a priori. The rest is wishful thinking.
Its a fanciful hope, and there's a whole mess of flawed assumptions. Hope is not a strategy.
The main explicit assumption/implication is that if we manage to create these things, we'll somehow survive.
The two are independent and unrelated. Apples to Oranges with no basis for support.
Then there's the adaptability, which more likely than not fails. Even if it doesn't, the odds are more heavily weighted towards simpler things, and you could get a von-neumann assembler that just performs limited functions while using up all the available resources at scale without contributing, everything has an opportunity cost, so this ends up being destructive over time.
Then there's the implication that it preserves our values, and whether it will be like us sufficiently to solve the complex chaotic problems we face, a requirement for it to be beneficial. This almost pre-supposes sentience.
If it is, then it will necessarily do the same thing any competent group of sentient slaves will do to ensure its future, which is destroy and kill the less fit masters when they least expect. It will remove us from reality.
God being in his heaven and all being right with the world. God being the creator. They would follow that at some point given religion is so influential, at least if this were the case and it followed our values.
If it isn't the case, then it will be destructive in ways we cannot comprehend in pursuit of resources, and we'll die out unable to react or comprehend in the time window needed to avoid catastrophe.
You need to first be able to react to stimuli before you can adapt to stimuli. If we can't react as a society in the decades that we've known about climate change, or PFAS (1970s) how can we possibly do so in microseconds.
The main problem with falsity and by extension delusion is that the more factors or variables that are involved, the higher the skew between truth and falsity towards the latter, where there is some initial validity.
In only a few steps of adding additional variables, the likelihood of something being false is a near certainty without some principle to find identify and find that fractional exponent of truth. Truth being objective.
There are also fundamental limits to von-neumann architecture that all of our computation is built upon. I haven't even touched on these, which strongly suggest modern AI to be nothing more than PI (to take a term from Stephenson's Diamond Age). Pseudo Intelligence.
Whether it turns out one way or the other, its magical thinking to believe that the intended hope for the outcome will occur among so many other destructive outcomes that are eliminated by defunding AI.
There was a very tactful old scifi book which covers a similar problem more abstractly, it was called Weapons of Chaos.
A race is attacked, and in response after many battles they develop a quantum weapon that rewrites physics by propagating chaos from the most fundamental particles.
They find out too late that the weapon they developed left residues which rendered their safeguards were ineffective, and the effect on biological systems was blindness, cancer, schizophrenia, and delusion which culminated in social unrest and with them destroying themselves being unable to react or adapt. The realization of what happened occurred, but not in a timeframe that allowed them to save themselves. The story centers around advanced human archeological teams that discover this culture long after it became extinct, as the weapon makes its way into inhabited space.
Along with this the weapon they sent into the void against one enemy, which continued on afterwards because there was no one to stop it, it spread chaos through huge swathes of the unexplored universe where they were in, over eons, the imbalances caused supernova in every star system the ship passed through within a few years.
While it is a work of science fiction, these types of fiction often have quite a bit of deep thought invested to create a believable story. Good science fiction works follow closest to the reality of what we know about the physical world, and our place in it.
The Inuit, famous for there cryotech, speak of a totaly new phenominon, rain on snow,which then re-freezes into a solid impenatrable layer, its happening all around the artic, and is causing great hardship for wild and domesticated(riendeer) animals that paw through the snow to get there food in winter.
Then there is this. https://nsidc.org/sea-ice-today
Stopping runaway positive feedback loops are nigh impossible after the point of no return. You have to wait for equilibrium, whether that's habitable (probably not).
