I remember in the late 90s, me and some friends discovered the internet and went "Woah! Letters, books, shops, work, study, gaming ... pretty much everything will take place in this virtual realm soon!".
We were right. Except for the "soon".
When the first internet café opened, we started spending a lot of our time there, meeting lots of interesting people. Everything outside the internet already seemed anachronistic to us.
What I didn't expect back then was that even replacing letters with email (which already worked!) would take another painstaking ... 20 years!
Today, my work is already massively transformed via neural networks. Pretty much everything I do starts with an interaction with a neural network. Usually a question to an LLM. And then LLMs or other networks are involved all the way up to finishing the task. Thinking about how I worked before these large neural networks came up makes me shiver. How cumbersome. How anachronistic.
But when I talk to people outside the tech sphere, most are not using LLMs or other neural networks at all.
Everything humans do will be deeply transformed. Even more so than via the internet. Will it take 20 years again? Or is technological progress accelerating and this time it will take only 10 years? So far, my feeling is that it will be a bit faster, but not twice as fast.
But maybe it will be even more surprising. One future I can imagine is that people don't even need to adapt. Maybe we will see software simply do all aspects of a job. One can already imagine it for driving cars or making movies. It is harder to imagine it for managing a company, for example. But who knows. LLMs are already surprisingly good at creating chains of thoughts. Maybe we'll find ourselves in an unexpected future in a few years already, where human involvement in anything is just a burden to the process.