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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.
Unfortunately, AI is coming to eat your lunch. Once AI agents get good enough (and people actually start using them), they will simply bypass your store and deny you your cut.
You may currently be providing a valuable service by connecting customers to the products they want to buy where they want to buy them, but AIs will soon be able to also do that at scale, and they demand a much, much smaller fee (often zero).
This is something I’ve tried to talk to smart people at work about who actively employ AI and they never seem to think through the implications.
Here’s one example I’ve given before - AI agentic sales outreach. For a brief 6 months, in 2024 orgs who adopted the ability to research contact, write “personalized” emails, and send cadences at scale had a super power. And a few startups got amazing buzz over it. Then it was table stakes and once everyone gets more in their inbox it becomes junk again.
If AI was good enough that you could send the exact right message to me at the exact best time to consider your product, the first 10 people would get an easy sale. But as soon as this is available to everyone of the 10 million businesses who think I should buy their product, it will just ruin email altogether.
This has always been an arms race but AI will not in the long run improve email outreach, but break it. I think this is going to be the same in a lot of areas
I was recently hiring a freelancer on Freelancers.com, and it was impossible to distinguish between them, they were all AI-written and virtually identical.
Yeah exactly, resumes are already an example where AI just broke the concept, not improved anything. You can argue that people could always get external resume help. But the friction was valuable information itself. That someone went out of their way to find and rely on another humans help and discern quality was in itself a signal so it was ok to not know whether this polished resume was self written or professionally assisted.
Now every resume is AI polished with the pus of a button. Instead of improving resuming anyway, it just broke the function
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