Gender reassignment and its associated artificial hormones / blockers is also a technology. Crypto coins and NFTs are also a technology.
Pursuing technology is all fine and dandy, but let's not pretend every single latest technology is a net positive on society and should be adopted en masse.
I think it's quite reasonable to be conservative with technology whose actual utility is dubious and margin compared with its capacity for harm. With mobile payments and e-commerce, the benefits were quite obvious; lower costs and friction for transactions which would increase the volume and speed of transactions. The concern was security but at least that is a well-defined and understood problem with very little chance of unintended consequences.
With Chat-GPT style "AI"[1]? It's little more than a search engine / chat bot and reveals it's fundamental flaws when asked anything complex. On the coding side, ask it anything more complicated than boilerplate/toy code and it just spits out nonsense. Not only nonsense, but sometimes hard-to-discern nonsense that may fool the less attentive. What is the utility here? Replacement of call-center (live chat) representatives? That is a legitimate reduction of cost for companies, but there are so many more downsides. Producing semi-convincing items that simply don't work. Vast increase in ghost writers answering school questions, essays, etc. Further and more convincing astroturfing on social media and e-commerce websites. The list goes on. There are so many easily foreseeable societal consequences, let alone the unknown unknowns. Societal problems are also, in general, the hardest to resolve. The benefits are not even close to offsetting the costs here.
It is quite easy to predict whether emerging technologies have potential to be useful. It's baked in to its business proposition. That only thing we don't know is how long and how much effort is needed to get that technology to a useful state. For example, fusion is going to be useful if it ever works. The problem there is we don't know how many decades or even centuries is needed to get it to work. On the other side, we also know ANT-style regulation-less digital banking is not going to ever be useful, regardless of how easy or hard it is to achieve. Stuff like Chat GPT and deepfakes in their current form lands in the latter rather than the former.
Research should continue of course, but not mass adoption.
[1]I specifically mention "AI" here because the approach demonstrated by Chat GPT and it's like are fundamentally unable to achieve GAI. Hence, we must be aware of its intrinsic limitations regardless of how developed it becomes. In other words, it can't become more than a chat bot.
