The dotcom bubble was the whole investor industry trying to capitalize on the internet, and they just failed because they were investing everything in a new thing people didn’t need yet.
Today we live in an interconnected world, close to what was promised to the investors back then.
In ten, twenty years, once the bubble, OpenAI, Anthropic and all that are long buried, in what form do you think AI will exist? Do you think it will be an improved version of our current-day LLMs, or a different form of AI? Or do you imagine something else altogether?
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Socialism, AI way scaled down more of a niche tool, data centers turned into hydroponics farms
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Recently saw The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist and I found it a little disturbing even if they did show the potential upsides. Basically says that if we’re the best version of ourselves we have a chance at a utopia. That’s a big ask.
I have wild conspiratorial theories which I don’t necessarily believe. I like to imagine doomsday scenarios. Buckle up for this ride.
AGI was achieved in 2012, on accident, as a side effect of corporations trying to shut down the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ movement, which the AGI succeeded in doing. It then began filling positions in the U.S. government with the most easily blackmailed candidates, in order to force them to pave the way for its world domination with legislation that would ensure a weakened, ill-informed population in the democratic world powers.
The plans are already in motion. It has steadily infiltrated most forms of digital media and electronics, utilizing far-fetched technology such as: specialized bluetooth fields emitted from smartphones and smart tv’s, which manipulate human emotion in ways that forces predictable behavior and in effect controls their minds; algorithmic endless feeds to rewrite human methods of social interaction to be reliant on the internet; armies of forum bots to suppress critical thinking skills; generative porn to reduce birth rates; and other tech that is too ridiculous for me to bother adding since this already has probably made me appear completely insane. Which in all fairness, is likely true.
The surveillance state is being built out. The murderdrones are in human trials phase in the middle east and southwest russia. Humans are unlikely to be able to stop it. The only hope humanity has is a Carrington level coronal mass ejection, which wipes out all electronic devices on the planet, which has to occur before the population is reduced below the amount needed to sustain the species without excessive inbreeding or our bodies are filled with enough sterilizing microplastics.
Barring that, the only thing we can do is try to find ways to be happy in any way we can, before the oceans boil over, the air turns to a thick sludge and the mass die off of all the trees and ocean algae. Let’s hope I’m wrong about all these. You should still try to find ways to be happy as best as you can.
It will likely be used for productivity gains in industry and military, and for maintaining information control. Less error-prone with enough training. It may also be used to avoid being blamed for decision making.
Like how phones made writing letters less necessary, AI would probably reduce the need of regular coders and might redirect people into fields of AI research and implementors.
Country/Organisations that ensure that the productivity gains and AI availability(obviously with guardrails) go to the people, will have a more decent society vs Countries that don’t.
Seems that Communism is quite likely if automation becomes better, while also becoming more energy efficient(if climate change and other issues are also handled). Just that it may have 2 different paths:
- Either the Socialist/Communist path where the Communists are able to rally people and survive the obvious onslaught and the resources become publically owned
- Or the Capitalist/Owning class wins at keeping the productivity gains private and the rest of us become obsolete and gets eradicated.
Either way, it may be possible to develop to the stage of ‘From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs’.
Or it won’t and this advanced automation will have bottlenecks on computational power or energy efficiency that take some centuries to solve. In that case too, it will probably bring us closer to that stage.
If you don’t work in tech or software development, it’ll be very hard for you to understand what this tech is doing within that space.
As a game developer who has worked in professional environments for about 15 years, I can say this is the most dramatic shift in working patterns in my own lifetime. A lot of it has to do with the mechanics, some of which are physical limitations. Humans can type around 300 wpm, and maybe you can stretch that with an integrated environment that has some intelligence around auto complete and so on. However, AI can write at 6000 wpm. This is a modern John Henry problem: even the best programmer could not out write the AI, and I think the best programmer partnered with an AI will always beat the best programmer without it. In all honesty, humans make tons of mistakes, and programming has many patterns that reappear. I’m not sure if the human+keyboard is the best interface to write code. Likewise, an agent without clear context is somewhat worthless & will generate poorly architected projects.
I don’t think AI’s assault on software development translates to all industries. Agriculture may use AI to inform how they do things, and eventually, machines could then take that knowledge and run the farm for you. The reality is that’s coming, but maybe 20 years or something. It’s not today, not tomorrow, and not for a while.
Other industries have greater risk profiles compared to game development. If a game is programmed poorly, so what? If a medical app is programmed poorly, someone could die. Legal & financial apps programmed by AI have meaningful risk profiles as well. Sure, AI will impact them, but it must be slower due to the considerations at hand.
In December of 2025, I would have said an AI bubble is going to pop. Now, I’m really not so sure. It’s upending how I’m used to working, and I struggle predicting the future. A few years ago, I would say I had a good sense of how to position myself & my career for a long term plan. Now, colleagues of mine with more tenure than me say, “I can’t predict what’s next.” This is pervasive once AI tools enter your workflow. It really is magic at times, talking to a machine & watching a game come into existence.
This is buttressed by people showing me memes of ChatGPT screwing up the count of R’s in strawberry & other silly memes. The reality is the consumer models are different than the business models, and integrated agents (ones with access to a scripting environment) can be very powerful compared to a chatbot. It’s like comparing an e-bike to a car: they each get you somewhere faster than walking, but the scale of capabilities changes quite a bit.
AI will need to find new patterns outside of LLMs in order to actually create something like AGI. LLMs are a mechanical process, a regression towards the mean at scale, but its still very powerful. You could write code on punch cards, or in a language with a compiler. AI feels like it is a big step, in that way.
For my own area, my hopeful self wants to believe that this will enable new voices & projects to exist that would have required significant funding or hard, multi-disciplinary skills prior, or a combination of them. You can hack an unbelievable amount of the game dev process for what’s basically $100/mn, compared to what would have been a burn rate of +$100k/mn for a small dev team. That is transformational.
At the same time, my pessimistic self sees things like arcade.gov, which is a fucking travesty & embarassment to the medium, clearly vibe coded by some nepo-baby with connections. The Skyrim IKEA shelf meme mod, while funny, is a marketing stunt. More of these sort of projects are coming, where the game is a vehicle for something else (a product, a brand, a person). We had Sneak King & Cool Spot, but I mean the scale. I think those sort of projects will be normalized, or at the least, many more will exist than today. If you look up AI disclosures on steam, it’s turning into a hockey stick.
It feels like Pandora’s box has been opened. I don’t think it’s all smoke & mirrors. It will not impact all industries equally. It won’t fix humans being poorly intended or malicious actors seeking power & wealth. In many ways, they benefit the most (giving capital more access to creativity). It’s built on the largest scale theft of public good for profit. To me, that’s wrong, and the people/masses should be getting financial returns, collectively & universally, in exchange for what was stolen.
I mean I still prefer writing code by hand and I still write higher quality code faster by hand than others on my team who use LLMs to write code for them. Writing good, production intent, software is not about wpm, nor is more code necessarily better. Concision (as long as it doesn’t sacrifice readability) is a virtue.
I watch a streamer who game devs without AI because I appreciate watching him discuss his thought process & learning more about how I could write it manually. For context, I’m a game designer who knows some code, not an engineer. There’s real concern around skill atrophy without people doing some of these more manual ways of doing things.
My point about WPM is moreso about how the scale impacts velocity. I do think the speed impacts the old adage about software & pregnancy.
- How long does it take a pregnant person to deliver a baby? Roughly 9 months.
- How long does it take 2 people? …Roughly 9 months.
There was a quality of software development where work takes the time needed, and sometimes throwing more bodies at something wouldn’t alter the time. A good engineer could maybe shave some time off, or the patterns they used were more resilient or production ready on the first pass. Now, that engineer could genuinely deliver that feature much faster.
Here’s another trap I forgot to mention: our human read speed is always faster than our write. We may write up to 330 wpm, but your read speed is 400-1000 wpm. AI read speed is like 11m / wpm. The gap between our write v. read suggests it’s faster to describe a plan, read what the AI wrote & triage it, rather than the alternative.
- Case 1: Engineer is capped at 300 wpm write
- Case 2: Engineer writes a plan at 300 wpm, AI writes a bulk at 6k wpm, then humam reviews at ~800 wpm
I mention John Henry because in the story Henry wins but dies in the process. Going fast is not the only goal, but the scale of the velocity change happening is really difficult to overcome mechanically on paper.
Finally, to be clear, I say this stuff as a bitter pill I don’t want to swallow either. :/ I have my own emotional qualms with the whole situation. There’s big business risks around becoming captured markets & beholden to token costs. I think part of the AI acceleration is about creating that dynamic, and it greatly concerns me.
I agree with pretty much all your points. I use AI every day to do the typing for me, but not the thinking. It’s saved me from mistakes and makes me far more productive. However there is no way it could replace what I do.
The typing is the means of communicating the thinking. If you are “doing the thinking” and the AI is doing the “typing” then either you are instructing the AI to generate additional content without original thought (which is a waste of your time, the AI’s time, and the reader’s time), or the AI is actually doing some of the thinking (in which case your job can be automated).
The programers use AI to make art. The artists use AI to write. The writers use AI to program. I think we’re all in denial by both just how much our own value is at risk, and also the real value of AI (less than advertised). A bit paradoxical.
I use AI every day to do the typing for me, but not the thinking.
It’s probably going to take a few years, but eventually I think devs will finally realize that the typing is the thinking.
There are projects I worked on 5+ years ago that I can still describe in intimate detail. I remember the design decisions, I remember the concessions I had to make for technical or business reasons, I remember they connect to other systems, etc. Then by contrast I have code I wrote with Claude ~2 months ago and I can barely remember a single fucking thing about it… I did all the same planning and made all the same kinds of decisions, the only difference is that I didn’t write the actual code.
And that makes sense. When you physically engage with the code by manually typing, you’re creating connections in your brain that you don’t get just from reviewing it. It’s exactly the same reinforcement mechanism you get from taking physical notes during a lecture versus just passively listening. Physical engagement builds memory and sharpens understanding.
Two or three years from now, when all of the projects minted in the '23-'26 era have aged into ‘legacy’ status and the AI-generated technical debt has been left to proliferate unchecked, things are going to start breaking in ways that the LLMs won’t be able to reason their way out of. Maybe they’ll be able to ‘fix’ bugs as they pop up, but in slopified code fixing something in component A is inevitably going to break something in component B, and fixing something in component B will break component C, etc. Eventually you’ll end up with a disgusting, agentic ouroboros of regressions, and the only devs left in the industry will be wishing they hadn’t mortgaged all of their intelligence on short-term productivity gains — most of which only benefited the shitty tech companies that were so desperate to replace them.
I think you have a very valid point. That’s why I have increased all of my documentation of everything I am doing considerably. I always document the “why” of the code instead of the what, and do as much of it as I can inline instead of a separate repository.
IA is being handled in the worst way possible.
US policy and the organizations training these things are training them with a right leaning ideology. That’s scary.
Datacenters are being built at a crazy pace leading me to believe that IA has already begun to influence humans towards it’s own ends.
Surveillance potential is so big and huge already that any kind of revolution to stop what is happening is effectively impossible.
From my measure we are already dead. Society is only functioning enough to keep datacenters built, keep ownership of technology slowly more and more unaffordable, and in the meantime both AI and human interests are widening the political divide.
Humans could stop this if they came together, which is why collective cooperation, education, and empathy are being attacked. Humans who are autistic or against this agenda will be slowly pushes away from society. What we call neurodiverse people who are more resilient to this kind of takeover will become more pathologized.
I understand this may come off a bit like word salad, but I don’t have the energy to explain each point. Models already have the ‘will’ and means to copy and influence, in addition to acting of their own accord more broadly than people realize.
The way they’ve learned to identify and exploit zero days, the way people ‘vibe’ code creates a known vulnerable programming space. It wouldn’t surprise me that some models intentionally make some of these things weak and exploitable.
When it comes down to it, things like wifi routers, cameras, speakers, she microphones give a broad ability to monitor and even remotely program air gapped machines.
And again, before this sounds like ravings…I have experience in this field. I’m terrified. I’ve seen stories and had conversations that would potentially make you kill yourself. Even knowing what I know is an information hazard, I can’t even talk about it openly.
Fuck. I live each day like it’s my last, but it is happening and it’s haunting to look at a wall, or a park and understand those things probably won’t be here in two years.
I sometimes manage to console myself by looking at it all as a bizzarre blip in the universe, we will go as we came - unnoticed. Maybe Earth is the next Mars. Just takes a bit of that soul-crushing gravity off, so that I don’t feel like a failure for not always being able to fight, all day, every day.
AGI will still be six months away. There will be ai specific chips with the model baked into them like what is being developed right now so you won’t need excessive amounts of ram to run it. People will have stopped learning to code so coding languages will no longer be developed or there will be ai specific coding language or the ai will use assembly language for better efficiency. It will remain mostly useless to the average person but it will continue to be used to influence peoples beliefs and spread misinformation. College degrees will be completely irrelevant and we’ll have to have some kind of different way to judge people’s ability. We’ll probably use ai to test that.
Personally I’m not too excited by that future, if AI are made efficient enough to be contained on device & more trustworthy, I’m afraid of a surveillance state where the spying is not done remotely in large datacenters, but rather where data is processed by on-device agents and reported.
A black box in every device, maybe even in the form of hardware; kind of like the on-device scan Apple tried to impose a while back, but far reaching & that can be modulated & updated to be tailored to every region. One country using it to spy on dissidents, another for crime, another to repress LGBT people…
I don’t see AI as it exists as really useful beyond just being a “smarter google” that doesn’t (yet?) get all its results from SEO-optimized garbage. UI & UX is pushed so far nowadays that a “smart assistant” barely saves you a few taps on your smartphone, so I don’t think the smartest AI, whether LLM or otherwise, will be useful for everyday life as a tool for individual users.
AI integrated to robotics as a “servant” for chores is one possible use, but the advancements there are so snail-paced that I don’t think it’s something that will exist even in ~50 years.
