It's a "land grab" situation, every competitor spending a fortune to leap the other, with no regulation or even fences whatsoever (until the government steps in and controls solely based on bias, aka "wokeness").

It's like asking race car drivers to voluntarily slow down, when they are driving rocket sleds with no brakes. Simply unbridled, unprincipled megalomania of the James Bond villain variety, except that those villains had far less power at their disposal.

And no James Bond.

I don't tend to worry about things, more-so than is maybe healthy, but that's just how I am. I very much like the Newt Scamander quote about worry:

"worrying means you suffer twice"

Having said that, my advice to anxiety ridden family members of "just don't worry about it" isn't generally taken as useful or actionable advice, so I'll make an attempt at logic:

I think the nuclear arms race was scarier. It was literally designed as a city-destroying super-weapon. AI is at least designed as a profit-making service first, and anything it is then used for is secondary - which, to be fair, will include weapons / weaponisation, but at least it's not the primary raison d'être.

Additionally, I have a certain amount of faith in humanity's ability to deal with an existential crisis. There's an odd 'other side of the coin' to a government's desire to stay in power (which I don't usually trust) which can actually mean it will work surprisingly well to ensure it's own remaining viability in times of actual crisis. I'm hesitant to point to the COVID response, for reasons of political divisiveness of the resulting commentary, but governments generally took the advice of experts in the interest of maintaining a population to be able to govern over - which is better than the alternative.

Ultimately, I just don't worry about it. But I do pay attention to it. I worry about what I can control on a day-to-day basis, and don't really have a lot of mental space or energy for much else. I find that to be a healthy mental space to occupy.

That dread is not because of AI, but because of the unknown. People at the start of the 20th century felt the same way about mass production. Now, we are living through another technological leap. Yes, it could doom us, but some could argue that fossil fuels did the exact same thing.