More reasons to dismiss inevitability:
"Now, inevitabilism is a philosophical error, and we can refute it philosophically. If I had to refute it, I would focus on three counterarguments:
• Inevitabilism overly assumes a kind of infinitely liquid market where if you don't act, someone else will step into your role. Some industries are sort of like that. But AI is the exact opposite: it's an area where a large share of progress is being made by very few people and businesses. If one of them stops, things really would appreciably slow down.
• Inevitabilism under-weights the extent to which people make decisions collectively. If one person or company makes a certain decision, that often sets an example for others to follow. Even if no one else follows immediately, it can still set the stage for more action further down the line. Bravely standing against one thing can even remind people that brave stands in general can actually work.
• Inevitabilism over-simplifies the choice space. Mechanize could keep working toward full automation of the economy. They also could shut down. But also, they could pivot their work, and focus on building out forms of partial automation that empower humans that remain in the loop, maximizing the length of the period when humans and AI together outperform pure AI and thus giving us more breathing room to handle a transition to superintelligence safely. And other options I have not even thought about.
But in the real world, inevitabilism cannot be defeated purely as a logical construct because it was not created as a logical construct. Inevitabilism in our society is most often deployed as a way for people to retroactively justify things that they have already decided to do for other reasons - which often involve chasing political power or dollars. Simply understanding this fact is often the best mitigation: the moment when people have the strongest incentive to make you give up opposing them is exactly the moment when you have the most leverage."
- Vitalik Buterin, Galaxy Brain Resistance