Just because people are angry does not make it false.
> Why da f*#$ do they have to continue developing a technology which they think will replace droves of people by machines??
Because arms race.
Game dynamics and incentive structures don't cease to exist just because someone notices them.
All those devs and data scientists and PhDs make a choice though. They could quit and work somewhere else. Even in a tough market their skills are in demand. They choose to work on this every morning.
There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all! (from Mario Savio)
Sure, they could do that. The outcome wouldn't change, though.
If SW devs who worked on ride sharing apps didn't leave, why would you think these folks would?
If SW devs who worked on airline ticket search engines didn't leave, why would you think these folks would?
And on and on and on. The SW industry has been heavily involved in replacing jobs since its inception.
> The SW industry
Partly the issue is, it was never the right model.
If you write/wrote code, you were a manager. Probably a better one than your "people manager" ever was, but that is/was arguably a different skill. What you managed was extremely technical, more akin to a line manager or an operations manager than a people manager.
Which, yes, everyone could not be the manager. Everyone who was not the manager could be quality control (QC), and handle the parts that "only a human" could handle.
The problem is, AI fits in nowhere in this equation, rather it throws it out. AI can manage, like any manager it can short circuit it's QC, in pursuit of an arbitrary metric. Even the idea of "human in the loop" is fundamentally flawed - if the human is not at some level the one directing (managing), there is no reason to stop incuding the human, less and less, in the work.
AI is not useful to us.
> Because arms race.
The irony is, they are building their own competitor...
Yeah, we get that nobody can trust China/Russia/USA/Shady cabal of too-rich-people, but we stopped the atom bomb because it was MAD (mutually assured destruction).
We need a similar treaty to ban any use of AI in this fashion, because all that will happen is creation of weapons that are inevitably turned on their owners.
And then, yes, as a coalition, declare war on any country that violates this.
I hate to be a proponent for war, but one's coming either way. I'd prefer a relatively peaceful resolution to some of our problems, not a "oh my god the robots have rebelled, and we are losing" scenario.