I hate to tell someone else about their field, and I still think you're hitting on one component of the problem.

1. AI ethics has, certainly from my outside view, coalesced around a particular empirical/metaphysical claim (on the empirical side, AI is useless / a con; on the metaphysical side, that AI does something different from human brains, is just a stochastic parrot, and can't reason or produce useful text). This view was wrong when stochastic parrots was first published, and the obviousness of that wrongness is continually increasing. And yet so far I have seen relatively little motion to recognize that. It's not just being obviously wrong: it's the failure to build a track record of accurate predictions.

2. Because of the uniformly critical slant of the field, false claims (about AI and water, for example, which long predate Hao) that are negative about AI go unchallenged, resulting in bad thinking filling the field, bad thinking that outsiders can see. Intellectual diversity is useful, but the field understands itself, it seems, as having an agenda, and that's almost always harmful for making true statements.

3. Because the field is, at least as perceived from the outside, so overwhelmingly left-wing, it's been unable to usefully engage with anti-AI populist conservatives, and the AI hostility means that the only ability to work with anti-AI regulation people is hating EAs. So to the extent that the field talks to policymakers, it's limited to a fraction of people on the left.

4. As you point out, the constructive work is good and important. It's also incredibly rare, and I think that tends to make a field have less influence. This also seems to fit, say, sociologists vs economists: the latter so much more neutral and constructive work that policymakers can use, rather than just complaining.

5. My personal favorite AI Ethics Moment is the complaints about facial recognition being worse at identifying Black faces. It's obvious that if models had come out and were reliably *better* at identifying Black faces than white faces, that also would have been taken as evidence of anti-Black racism and something that needed to be changed because of how it empowered the carceral surveillance state. If you make the same critique regardless of the data, you're not providing information. And yet that's what I expect from the field.

I really want AI Ethics to be a vibrant field that raises good points and helps our culture adapt to AI better. I agree that you have raised some important points. But I have little optimism for the field.