Many of us have not been persuaded by the pervasive, kneejerk fear of AI that floods social media.
If social media had been around in the past, we'd have never developed trains or electricity or cars because of the crippling fear that something bad might happen along the way.
I don't see cars as being comparable to the universal usage of electrical energy as an intermediate of converting physical forms of energy. Not even close.
And also, the "deployment" of cars if you will, has brought and still brings malignant effecfs on society, not only positives. If by cars you mean cars for transporting individual people in non-critical situations and the corresponding industrial and political developments, especially around urban planning.
Nor arguing about the significance of the effects, but the discovery of electricity and how to use it seem more useful to me than the discovery of using fossil fuel cumbustion for transporting people.
Road transit in total is a different thing of course.
If a technology has positives and negatives consequences for the world, but the positives outweigh the negatives, then we want those technologies to be developed. For cars, the positives outweigh the negatives.
Regarding the comparison: it's just that there are infinitely many modes of transporting people different from cars, that's why I argued against it.
I would not argue against the point that cars in themselves are very useful.
If the point however is how we are using them and how many of them we build or how we arrange our living around the necessary public infrastructure to use cars for anythint, I'm not sure if I agree.
IMO, as of now, this is a case of "market failure", if you will. But I know that the majority of people don't agree with this.
As I see it, one of the main usages of cars seems to be to use them for not having to be around car traffic: e.g. living in suburbs, "escaping" into nature on the weekends.
I don't think anyone (well maybe the Amish) are arguing that all technology is bad. Only that some technology might be bad, and it is worth trying to figure out the implications of releasing increasingly capable models to the public.
If social media had been around in the past, we'd have never developed trains or electricity or cars because of the crippling fear that something bad might happen along the way.