That's some way to frame it, not that these companies are causing a problem, but that there is some nebulous "they" that will use the models for 'evil' only if

That's some way to frame it, not that these companies are causing a problem, but that there is some nebulous "they" that will use the models for 'evil' only if the 'good' companies put in the work. But in any reasonable definition they are all part of the same system, so it really is just noise, what seems like a tautology to you because you can't step out of the system. In your claim you have to assume that the force behind the panic wasn't the same force that created those issues. Why did this force create those issues, how did they become issues? Because someone randomly decided to optimize for a single goal. Y2K and ozone only became issues when they affected that single goal, functionally that force was amoral or singularly moral. The tautology can be reframed as: An adaptive system responds to threats to it's continued functioning. People will laugh about it since the system wormed it's way into many people's head using various rewards (ideological, social, tangible). What concern me is that the system now gives us the language to describe it at the meta level, which means it's already a level higher. So likely there either doesn't exist human comprehensible language that can actually critique the system or the system has already moved everyone far away from the space that would lead to generation of that vocabulary. Best case scenerio it's just exceedingly confident in it's rewards (typical indoctrination/assimilation) but I think it's reasonable at this point to assume we are in the pessimistic "epistemic tarpit" scenario.