“We definitely weren’t designed to cope with all this — our bodies, our nervous systems, our brains. Among all the other dangers these developments represent, they’re simply wearing us out. A lot of us would like politicians to offer, alongside their promises of affordability, even a glimpse of serenity.
…
In past periods of pervasive crisis, Americans at least had some institutions on which to lean. We’ve traditionally thought of the president as a kind of national father figure. It helped a Depression-haunted nation when Franklin D. Roosevelt told us the only thing we had to fear was fear itself (and then backed it up with wave after wave of programs designed to make it so).
President Trump’s main response to our A.I. fear is to rename it “superintelligence,” while the country’s chief health authority, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has decided it’s time to go to work on “chemtrails” from airplanes. The tech chieftains wring their hands a bit about the trouble they’ve caused (remember, their creations have broken into companies and government agencies) and then get back to making their fortunes. Very few people feel like placing their trust in these powerful figures, young Americans most of all: Recent polling shows that roughly seven in 10 people ages 18 to 34 distrust Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Dario Amodei and the other would-be wizards leading the big A.I. companies.
A not irrational response to all this would be to try to ignore it. Lots of people are doing so. Yet this kind of avoidance will just get us in deeper trouble by ceding control to those who profit from it, so I hope we won’t choose quietism or escape.”