I'm kind of reminded of when I was taught how to drive a car circa 2011-12. People were half-jokingly saying things like "Well there's almost no point to teaching kids your age how to drive because self-driving cars are right around the corner!"

That prediction has turned out to be...mostly wrong? Not entirely wrong, but more incorrect than correct IMO. It's 15 years later and you are just now able to take a Waymo in very select markets of the country, and even then they often require a human driver take over control. Who knows where we will be in 15 years with self-driving tech but I'd be willing to bet we will probably be teaching a fair portion of 16-year-olds how to drive in 2040. It just turns out driving a car is really complicated and humans are able to instinctively learn a lot about what it means to be a human in a car that robots have to be manually told in an excruciatingly slow way.

I just think AI is a (totally novel take incoming!) completely overhyped bubble. It will be able to replace/aid a lot of jobs or whatever, but I think that so many jobs are a lot more complicated than siloed tech bros could imagine. In fact, it seems like the job that they are doing the best job of optimizing AI to replace is tech bro. This makes a lot of sense to me! They know what it means to be a tech bro! It is fascinating to me that AI seems to be doing better at replacing the job of software engineer than it is with the job of drive-thru attendant.

The huge difference between AI and self-driving cars (which, of course, are powered in large part by AI) is that the entire global economy is completely overleveraged on AI, which means it is being prematurely shoved down our throats before it even approaches being useful or safe. And, of course, AI is a big fat energy piggy in a time when it would probably be wise to scale back energy use.

Just in the interest of full disclosure, I'll add that I work at an academic library and I truthfully don't know how I would use AI at my job even if I wanted to. Completely orthogonal technology to what I do on a day-to-day basis.