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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.
Maybe tangential (and I apologize if this is not a direct response to you and may be more relevant a response to 2rafa's similar post below) but I think the largest innovation of LLM's that no one seems to really grasp or state explicitly is the speed of response of these models. It is not just that they can do some of your work, it is that they can do some of your work in seconds. I am self employed and work in ecommerce, and thanks to LLMs I can generate thousands of listings' worth of relevant keywords in plain English with great SEO in seconds. This work would have taken hours and hours of time to do it in the past, which does not mean I used to spend hours and hours doing it, it meant that I would come up with a solution that was much faster but much less effective than what I can do now. As a one-man show my work is significantly easier and faster than it was before LLM's. I am reaping the rewards of it every day. I am someone who has only worked one internship and spent about a year doing freelance work in my life, otherwise I have always been self employed. I feel so little empathy toward people whose entire careers have been working for someone else and who suddenly feel betrayed by their employers or afraid of being fired. You relied on others your entire life, and along comes the single greatest invention for self empowerment in centuries and instead of empowering yourself, utilizing the new powers of instant text generation trained on the knowledge of everyone ever, you worry about being replaced. Well, if you lack the self direction and discipline to harness new technologies then I just can't relate.
Similarly I don't understand the concern about people "not having anything to do" if they are on UBI. I work, actively, at a computer for about an hour a week, on average, and earn all of my money passively through that. I have never been bored and find plenty of meaning in my life. I have great faith that everyone else can - and frankly, should - live life in a similar way that I do. I spend much of my time traveling and thinking about philosophy and creating/designing when I am in the mood. I devote a huge amount of my time and energy to food and sex and relationships, but so do people who work full time jobs. I have never really accepted or bought into the mainstream modernist mode of work/life balance, see it as an abuse of power that I wouldn't accept for myself, and don't understand people who do- or these same people who fear its end.
Well, this is the rub. The UBI skeptic's worldview is a fundamentally aristocratic one which does not share your faith in the average individual. The UBI skeptic generally agrees that there is an intelligent, open-minded, agentic elite of individuals who can flourish when left to their own devices - he simply believes that lower-IQ or otherwise mentally disadvantaged people cannot say the same, and the happiness of a fraction of clever dilettantes is not worth leaving the Average Joe to rot his brain with 24/7 video games while shoveling nachos into his mouth.
I don't, myself, find this picture convincing, though it is a failure mode which it is worth bearing in mind. It seems to me that to the extent the horror stories about self-wireheaded proles living off the dole have some basis in fact, the individuals at issue don't actually have much in the way of the option of traveling the world instead, so they don't prove much. Moreover I think this kind of willpower-sapped listlessness should be understood as a form of clinical depression, and could likely be addressed with antidepressants if all else fails.
Still, you said you "didn't understand" the doomer viewpoint on UBI - well, here goes.
As a UBI skeptic, that's not my view. I agree that there is "an intelligent, open-minded, agentic elite of individuals who can flourish when left to their own devices". And a much larger group of people who will fit the stereotype "rot his brain with 24/7 video games while shoveling nachos into his mouth." But if UBI let everyone do what they wanted, that would be fine. I'm a skeptic because I don't believe in the implied abundance; someones going to have to produce all those nachos for the average Joe, and the videogames, and the electricity. And that's either going to be that first group, or some other group outside those mentioned -- no magic robot is going to do it for them. So you've got a group doing all the work, and a group reaping the benefits for nothing; that's not utopia, that's slavery. Talk to me about UBI when you've created the magic robots, and not before.
It seems pretty likely to me that the "magic robots" are coming. Why can't computers run an electricity generation facility? It's because they lack something which humans have. You can call that "know-how," "intelligence," "dexterity" or something else, but whatever it is, computers are getting better all the time at duplicating human skills. So it's reasonable to hypothesize that magic robots will be here sooner or later. And probably sooner rather than later.
That being said, it's been observed that science fiction writing is not about predicting the automobile but rather about predicting the traffic jam. My concern with UBI is that it will lead to unintended and negative consequences. So that instead of a utopia, we'll get something much less pleasant. What will happen to some beautiful beach on a tropical island paradise if suddenly billions of people have the time and resources to visit it? What will happen to marriage and family formation if your typical woman no longer needs help or financial support from any man? What sort of laws will the citizenry ask for if they have all the bread and circus they can handle but still aren't receiving the social status they think they deserve (because it's mathematically impossible for magic robots to create an abundance of social status)?
Jerry Pournelle wrote about a solution. Not a pleasant, utopian solution, but I don't think the citizen islands from the codominium are that implausible.
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