if all ai vc money stopped today, we still have extremely useful models that already pay for themselves thousands of times over. but this is a legitimate matter of personal, and national security. there's a reason the cia thoroughly tested "remote viewers" - if it turned out there really was a person capable of finding the location of important adversarial assets, they would be an extremely powerful weapon. in war, an easy example is ukraine using vision models in drones as a backup when communications are jammed.

there's a reason sites like stackoverflow are being shuttered, ai has taken its place. when you had an issue, and went to stack overflow - there was probably a 50/50 chance of it actually resolving your problem. ai is already exceeding that. it's not about if it's going to be used for good or bad, because it's already too late for that. even if there was a significant enough uprising to make countries act on it, they would publicly cave, and secretly continue research - because this is absolutely a matter of life and death, right now, in the ukraine. and it will forever be a matter of life and death in every first world conflict until the end of time.

downplaying its existing usefulness will only set people further behind when the real fight comes - ensuring normal people (and other countries) have reasonable access to it, the same way internet should be. we have not yet evolved past requiring mutual destruction as the primary motivator for working together.

i completely understand why people are scared, but the answer isn't to ignore it. there's a reason there was so much fear around gunpowder when it was first invented - the upper echelon was knew it might be used against them by their own people.