Moreover, Alaska passed its own alcohol prohibition laws before the nation-wide prohibition.

The amounts clearly aren't discrete. Writing your entire app on a new language runtime might be very risky (and also might have large potential ROI!), but choosing a new email provider might not be (random example, but presuming that you can swap out providers fairly easily).

[0] My bigger complaint is really about the vagueness of even deciding what is "boring." How does a new technology transition from being "non-boring" to being "boring"? Apparently that requires a lot of people to ignore this article's advice for a long time, until we collectively decide that those people have had good enough results to consider that technology "boring."

When there's a specific explanation why a specific experiment should move slowly (or even be prohibited), I respect that, but the explanation can't just be "we don't know all the bad things that might happen as a result of this experiment." That's the precautionary principle, which I staunchly oppose.

But that's not really what the hedonic treadmill refers to! The hedonic treadmill is referring to the fact that, when a problem is solved, the level of pleasure or happiness individuals experience reportedly quickly returns to the pre-solution baseline.

[0] Crucially, this must not be conflated with advocating a general slowdown or pause on attempts at progress. That's the civilizational death sentence.

There is an infinite sequence of future problems to be solved. Each time you solve a problem, you don't reduce the total number of future problems, but you are left with one or more better problems than you had before. It's a very good thing that, as soon as you get accustomed to having air conditioning, you start looking for the next problem to fix.

Surely a better way to think of this is that a person's AI agent will simply find, via whatever means necessary, the information that the person is interested in. It's hard to imagine the person will still be operating on the old "pull" model where they deliberately visit a specific website or open a specific app.

Well, sure. For it to ever be possible to say "life arose more than once," one must decide where the boundary between life and non-life is. After all, every precursor of life arose all at once, in the Big Bang!

If a movie studio or shipping company does that, then I do hope that “what’s next” is the same (or harsher) judgement and sentencing.

Not everyone has to agree. Just everyone in a particular group at a particular time. Grappling competitions exist and so do MMA competitions, and both of them will expect you to follow their own rules.