Seems to me that since no one has any idea what the outcome of AI will be it’s completely open to speculation by anyone. Sign up for your pundit membership here.
Here’s my speculation. The AI businesses, like so many tech businesses before them, do not make money nor do they have business models to allow them to make money. Therefore they need investors to pour billions of dollars into their companies to keep them afloat.
What will happen is that developers and the people who depend on them will get addicted to their productivity levels and then expect that to happen indefinitely. When the AI businesses either come up with exorbitant fees so high that no one can afford them or the cost of running the data centers that powers them puts the AI companies out of business, we will be awash in a bunch of half-baked code and infrastructure that no one understands, and even if they do it’ll take people 100 times longer to now do what needs to be done. Then the companies needing developers will scream at low test scores and universities for not providing them with a pipeline of people who will immediately step in and fix their problems — as if that ever existed in the first place.
Also, every time I hear hand-wringing about supposed AI problems I have to laugh. These are problems that have always been there, but AI — just like Trump and Covid-19 — simply magnifies the problems. And because it’s impacting the upper middle class, now it’s a problem.
AI will take all of our jobs! What jobs? Oh, you mean IT jobs. The only jobs that mattered and were available and if you didn’t want or couldn’t do those then you were to blame and you deserved a life right around the poverty line. Please.
The children aren’t learning! The children, the vast majority of them, hate your schools and weren’t learning anything anyway. And any of them that weren’t toeing the line were left behind. Once again — it’s their fault. But because privileged school children are now using AI to not do school work rather than just not doing the school work, now we’re in crisis.
Nevermind massive amounts of school loan debt, underfunding of public schools, and an already existing problem of lack of health care, skyrocketing prices, and no pathways for people to get to a decent way of life in a country where you’re supposed to go to an Ivy League school, and if not you can’t rot, and it’s your fault.
AI is simply an easy “problem” for the press to cover and report on while ignoring all the things that actually matter to people.
2nd Wheel 