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Comment by ednite | Hacker News Reader

Hats off to the author for expressing this so candidly, I really get where they’re coming from. While I tend to lean more toward the side of AI progression, it’s clearly an inevitable part of society now. I do worry about the long-term impact. I also feel that constant pressure to keep up, adapt, and integrate AI into everything feels like it’s already contributing to fatigue and burnout.

Thoughtful post.

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> it’s clearly an inevitable part of society now.

this won't be true until the financials are squared up. Right now there is a lot of funky math propping up these companies. If the bet doesn't pay off with real productivity gains the whole AI industry will disappear the way the first generation of AI assistants did ten years ago.

Remember Echo?

There's funky math propping up the training of new AI. That much is certainly true. But just running frontier models on hardware is very doable, and is already capable of absolutely changing the software landscape in the next decade, even if nobody ever trains a model again.

You make a solid point, the financials will ultimately decide how far this goes, as with most things in business.

That said, I don’t think it quite echoes Echo (that pun might be intentional) or maybe it does, financially speaking.

For me, this wave feels different: deeper integration, broader scale, and real-time utility. I agree, if the returns don’t hold up, a major correction isn’t off the table.

It reminds me a bit of the smartphone era, rapid adoption, strong dependence. I guess, the difference is, that phones had clear monetization paths. With AI, we’re still betting.

The bigger question for me is, if this all collapses, what happens to the workflows and investments already built around it?

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