I'm iffy on AI not because I think it'll take over the world, but because its creators are trying to accomplish what I believe is impossible and undesirable: making all humans unemployed and switching to a Universal Basic Income.
My bigger problem is with people who believe words speak louder than actions. Have you ever seen a "Words Have Power" poster? I have, and I don't believe it. The sentence "Words Have Power" essentially says all words have power all the time. It's saying that anybody can talk their way or write their way into or out of anything. Maybe you really can talk your way or write your way into or out of anything if you're a CEO or a published author or a hotshot celebrity or a head of state. But the vast majority of people will someday learn they can't if they haven't already learned, and when that happens, you will no longer be able to convince them that "Words have power".
That's why the DARE program was such a big failure for so long. The DARE program involved police officers lecturing kids on the dangers of drugs and alcohol and tobacco. DARE worked for me, but it didn't work for most kids. It relied solely on the "power" of words. Many kids didn't believe what the police officers were telling them, or they got more interested in using drugs because some of the effects of drugs sounded appealing to them. The officers naively assumed they were making a difference, but they really weren't, because the kids who didn't believe the officers and/or were more interested in drugs than they were to start with were too polite or too afraid to say so out loud in front of the officers and their teachers. Thankfully, most studies done on people who have completed the DARE program have found that it didn't work, and a few suggested it made the problem worse. Also, more effective methods of alcohol/drug/tobacco education have been found.
If I was to create an alcohol/drug/tobacco education program, I would wait until middle school. And I wouldn't rely on words. I would not only show students brain scan images of drug users and drug abstainers, I would pass around a portable brain scanner with screens on the front so only the kids wearing the scanner could see the scan results. Seeing the brain scan results of strangers has a lot less impact than seeing the brain scan results of your brain or the brain of someone you care about.
