Comment by ian_j_butler

Like US politics now, AI talk is just a team sport where there's no room for nuance. If you want to talk about such things then you need to anticipate this and work around it from the jump, making clear the expectations about the scope of the discussion and ground somewhere concrete. For politics it's gotta be economics, data, specific policy. For AI, it's gotta be research, benchmarks, very specific workflows or use-cases.

Even establishing the scope of the discussion is tedious, and most people have no patience for that, so the practical choices are basically having a dumb rah-rah type of discussion, or none at all. I'm breaking my own best advice by even writing this down but the only answer is: Read More, Talk Less. If you're in school and talking with other students or if you're talking to colleagues with known background in the context of known practical problems they would like to solve.. it's different. But the forums? Read-only is not even effective as far as "checking in" on the "collective culture" in engineering to get an accurate picture. Actually engaging is even more effort for even less profit. I regret having opened the thread, so back to burying my head in more research and hands-on projects :)