The speaker thinks people could have reasoned about the broad shape of AI developments earlier, even if they could not have predicted the specific details.

“um and committing felony is it would just be so wild and you might have been inclined at the time to talk more about extremely practical direct consequences of gpt2 or something but these are in some sense you obviously couldn't have foreseen a lot of the specific details but the general shape of things you could have started to reason about even then so uh but it would have been hard to do so and so i do feel quite confused and um uh but i i i do feel like the important thing”