I'm not so sure I would frame the question of LLM progress as a choice between allowing something great to happen to humanity and the potential for something horrible to happen. It will do both. Our technology always does both.
First we have to lose our Pinker-like obsession with Progress to something closer to John Gray's challenge to that thinking (i.e., "the *what* are we 'progressing' towards, really?"). The real question to all of this is if we can reap the benefits of this technology while closely monitoring its eventual harms and having the courage to impose limits to those harms.
I'm not so sure I would frame the question of LLM progress as a choice between allowing something great to happen to humanity and the potential for something horrible to happen. It will do both. Our technology always does both.
First we have to lose our Pinker-like obsession with Progress to something closer to John Gray's challenge to that thinking (i.e., "the *what* are we 'progressing' towards, really?"). The real question to all of this is if we can reap the benefits of this technology while closely monitoring its eventual harms and having the courage to impose limits to those harms.