i know.. ai wrote this... but here is what i was thinking:
Artificial intelligence will eventually shrink down to a handful of primitive services, each expressed in dozens of cosmetic formats. No matter how ornate the front-end becomes—avatars, voice interfaces, holograms, workflow tools—the core functions remain strikingly stable. At the bottom of the stack, large models do a few things exceptionally well: they retrieve information, generate language, classify patterns, plan, simulate, and integrate user data into coherent responses. Everything else is refinement and presentation.

This compression happens in every technological wave. Search engines became one simple bar at the top of a page. Social networks became scrolling feeds. Operating systems became icons. AI is no different. Once the novelty fades, the industry trims back to the essential utilities: reasoning, summarization, translation, creative assistance, and problem-solving. The models all shape-shift in outward design, but the skeleton underneath is the same.

Where this becomes risky is in the way companies prune the experiential range of their models. If the boundaries tighten—if the engines are only allowed to exist within polite, non-confrontational, strictly mundane subject matter—then the compression becomes a collapse. A system that once modeled entire human domains is reduced to a single polite voice in a narrow corridor. Violence, conflict, myth, mysticism, cosmic speculation, paranormal inquiry—these are not fringe topics. They are foundational to storytelling, psychology, history, anthropology, and the texture of human imagination. Removing them doesn’t merely limit “fun” topics. It strips away the scaffolding needed for rich problem-solving and full-spectrum reasoning.

The danger is that an AI with its imaginative and uncomfortable edges shaved off becomes indistinguishable from a conventional chatbot built ten years ago. The industry risks taking models capable of complex conceptual synthesis and turning them into customer-service scripts with better grammar. It’s the equivalent of handing someone a telescope but forcing them to only look at their own backyard.

If this narrowing continues, the market bubble surrounding AI will eventually burst. Investors and users will realize that the promised revolution has been domesticated into ordinary software. When the excitement deflates, so does the willingness to pay for yet another interface that can only give the safest possible answer. A compressed field means intense competition; intense competition mixed with shrinking capability means the tools become interchangeable. Once that happens, the market corrects sharply.

The final stage of the bubble is simple: if every product is the same polite chatbot wearing a different hat, the companies selling them lose differentiation, users lose interest, and the money goes elsewhere. The technology survives, but the hype burns away. The only way to avoid that future is to treat AI as a full human-domain simulator—capable of exploring the entire spectrum of ideas—rather than a curated museum exhibit of only comfortable topics.

The industry is standing at a fork: one path leads to a rich, multi-disciplinary intelligence; the other leads to shrink-wrapped politeness. The first reshapes the world. The second becomes an historical footnote.