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Prediction: We are heading for an AI-middle ground boom.
Predictions regarding AI tend to cluster in two extremes, those who believe we are on a parabolic arc towards super-intelligence and those who believe AI just produces slop. The pessimism regarding AI clusters around to conflicting narratives, it is so good it will cause mass unemployment and AI is so useless that the AI bubble will pop. My take is that AI is mid and that is a good thing. Gemini 3 and Claude 4.5 are useful. However, since LLMs are limited by context windows, social skills, an inability to learn after training and don't have human judgment they can't replace us. Both doomer narratives are false, we aren't going to replace all the software developers with claude, and claude is not so useless that users will abandon it, causing the AI bubble to pop.
The AI speedup is more than worker speed being improved by LLMs. Many projects are stalled waiting for someone else to complete a task. A typical corporate scenario is that someone works an hour on something, emails it to someone who waits a week before working an hour on it, and then sends it off to the next person. With LLMs enormous speed ups can be achieved by not having to wait for answers.
AI is much more than large language models. It has long been used in areas like weather prediction, and over the past decade its capabilities have advanced dramatically. Twelve years ago, AI systems struggled with basic image recognition tasks such as distinguishing cats from dogs; today, they can reliably detect subtle anomalies on factory floors. AI is now widely applied in biotech, scientific research, mining, oil extraction, fraud detection, and many other fields.
What once required a machine-learning PhD can often be accomplished in a matter of days by a technically competent practitioner using cloud platforms such as Google Cloud. While humanoid robots have captured public attention and robot butlers remain unrealistic, AI is already accelerating the deployment of industrial robots and other forms of automation. Advanced driver-assistance systems are reducing the risk of traffic accidents, and AI is speeding up academic work and scientific discovery. More broadly, AI excels at uncovering patterns in massive datasets and surfacing insights and information that would otherwise remain hidden.
Scientific work is iterative. Progress is built upon earlier progress, and one bottleneck in a chain of discoveries prevents the subsequent discoveries from happening.
If AI can unlock a few bottlenecks, that could unlock subsequent discoveries that depend upon them. We could see a small jump in scientific discoveries.
Predictions for the culture war:
We are not going to see mass unemployment, even if a few sectors end up being impacted. Smaller organizations are more nimble and able to react to changes while having similar access to AI as large corporations, this benefits small players. AI deflationary as the cost of production go down. AI in ecommerce is making the field even more cut throat driving prices down. Low inflation will cause low interest rates and high asset price inflation. The economy is going to have wind in its back over the next decade as productivity rises. Government is going to be worse at utilizing AI than the private sector leading to an increasing view of the government as incompetent and falling behind.
If we manage to achieve this path, I might consider it evidence that God (or the simulation masters) exist and loves humans.
Since this is the exact path we'd need to tread to avoid massive fallout from our demographic crisis while also avoiding entirely the existential risk issue.
I think the question that does need addressing even in this case is sincerely what to do about those who are dumber than AI on average, but can still perhaps do meaningful work under AI supervision or instruction. I don't want to relegate any humans to 'sheep' status, even if they are sort of happy under that paradigm.
Me, I kind of want to have a world where there's 'expert systems' almost everywhere, AIs that are specialized in various tasks (self driving cars being one example) and humans thus are still doing plenty of high-level decisionmaking, maybe consulting the big AI oracles when they do so.
But it does seem inevitable that people are going to be all too happy to offload any and all 'hard' decisions to AI and gleefully follow recommendation its makes even if its not superintelligent enough to optimize everyone's lives everywhere for maximum wellbeing.
So there is still a nightmarish scenario where the upkeep of our society is now 100x more complex thanks to all the work required to keep the AIs running, we can't really focus as much as we'd like on just things that make us happy since we're constantly being directed around to do all the tiddly little maintenance tasks, and if we get a disaster that breaks the AIs or similar breakdown, things will regress so fast all at once that we won't be able to prevent a full collapse.
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