Because making AI better is orthogonal to making human lives better. We are quite literally racing towards artificial superintelligence without any serious plan or preparation for the societal impacts that will have.
Did people prepare for or ever fully foresaw the downstream impact of any other major technological revolution, such as farming or the industrial revolutions or the Internet?
Has there been any other major technological revolution that underwent exponential recursive self improvement?
If AI development stopped right now, we would see a technological revolution at a scale similar to the Internet. AI development has not slowed down, let alone stopped. This technology demands far more planning than we are allocating.
AI inherently has misaligned incentives (as do the companies developing them). I don't trust them to outline the consequences of something like this and to develop an appropriate plan, and neither should you. I believe in humans, but we need time.
I don't think that is the thing that makes AI better. In the metaphor the idea is that someone scored a goal and then people retroactively shift the goalpost to say it doesn't count as a goal.
