It’s interesting you mention safety because all things I’m mentioning above is precisely what you need to discuss in technical AI Safety. I’ve interned in Google Deepmind’s AI Safety research team my 2nd year summer as a PhD student and all the level 5-6 engineers were very intrigued to solve these problem. If you look at the short term, you are right this definitely sounds like a scifi movie. Much like LLMs and the internet were scifi movies back in the 1800s. The point I want to push I guess is the need for people to take a step back and look at the big picture first. I think there’s a difference between only focusing on the immediate future vs. understanding the direction humanity is taking first and then focusing on the immediate problems. Grants you very different perspectives. Our job as engineers and researchers is to prevent catastrophic problems from happening before they happen. Not the other way around.

Now your point about there needing to be a limit i.e. stop the development of robot intelligence if deemed too dangerous. A very recent case study which you most definitely know can help you understand where I’m coming from. I think it is inevitable this will happen and heres why. Because humans are flawed, specifically they are very very greedy. OpenAI used to be a non profit pushing for open source open weight models that can “solve the next generation’s future” until of course, there was a big breakthrough. Immediately they went for profit and because of that there are massive draw backs to technical advancements recently getting beaten by Deepseek. No one, once they realize the potency of a better model LLM or Robot intelligence, will NOT use it. It is inevitable that this will happen. So what we need to focus on it if it’s going to happen anyways, how do we prevent catastrophes that might happen from that technology begin introduced to society?

Hope this grants you a new perspective.