Why am I not more concerned about AI? I have to admit, frankly, that part of it is distance. I hear concerns about data centers, and while I suspect they're sometimes overblown, there is some validity to them, but they don't affect me directly. I also assume smart people are working on ways to mitigate those problems. They're far from insurmountable.
There are lots of problems in the world. I type that sentence and immediately feel like it's a cope, but it's true. Why are we so focused on AI when some people still don't have enough food or lack access to necessary medical care? Obviously that's a "whataboutism". AI could be bad while those things are also bad, but I can easily argue that AI could literally help solve those problems. When implemented well, AI is a vehicle for efficiency. Multi-party, human-driven activities can easily become bloated and inefficient. Consider the game of telephone, or the bureaucracy you're subjected to when trying to get support from any large company, or worse, working there. Scaling is a legitimately hard problem, and AI is very good at helping collapse the barriers that tend to rise as a result.
So I do genuinely believe the potential benefits of AI outweigh the risks.
I have to acknowledge that I also find it fun. I'm a productivity junkie. My wife complains that on vacation, I'd rather go for a hike in the morning before lunch so I feel like I've earned the food. This is nonsense; there's nothing wrong with breakfast, but I can't seem to shake it. AI scratches this itch hard. Now that I've built a robust contextual base for what I do at my job, I can send Claude a one- or two-sentence summary and it "just works." I know why: I'm the one responsible for generating the context that makes it tick. So I can switch to another task knowing Claude is working in the background. I'll often have five agents running in parallel, and I'm starting to feel the benefits of subagents too (spawn_session, try it).
That's all to say there may be a dose of Stockholm syndrome involved. I don't want to think AI could end the world, because I like it. It makes me more productive.
Finally, I have to acknowledge that, short of switching careers, very soon I won't have a choice at all. AI is taking over the software world, and there's no stopping it. I like my job. So I'm choosing to adopt the new technology enthusiastically and get good at it.