This is how I perceive a lot of the AI being rammed down our throats: questionably useful.
I think AI is about to do the same thing to pair programming that full self-driving has done for driving. It will be a long time before it's perfect but it's already useful. I also think someone is going to make a Blockbuster quality movie with AI within a couple years and there will be much fretting of the brows rather than seeing the opportunity to improve the tooling here.
But I'll make a more precise prediction for 2026. Through continual learning and other tricks that emerge throughout the year, LLMs will become more personalized with longer memories, continuing to make them even more of a killer consumer product than they already are. I just see too many people conversing with them right now to believe otherwise.
These people have taken over the industry in the past 10 years.
They don't care anything about the tech or product quality. They talk smooth, loud, and fast so the leaders overlook their incompetence while creating a burden for the rest of the team.
I had a spectacular burnout a few years ago because of these brogrammers and now I have to compete with them in what feels like a red queen's race where social skills are becoming far more important than technical skills to land a job.
I'm tired.
>kill dragon
With what? Your bare hands?
>yes
Congratulations! You have just vanquished a dragon with your bare
hands! (Unbelievable, isn't it?)-bash: kill: dragon: arguments must be process or job IDs
\> sudo kill dragon
-bash: Congratulations! You have just vanquished a dragon with your bare hands!
Approximately nothing?
The real bubble is the United States as the global luddite with nukes. The rest of the world is continuing apace on every front while we desperately try to return to the previous century.
I mean when the chief current libertoonian talking points are we should flood the internet with AI generated child porn to reduce pedophilia, that Greta Thunberg is the Antichrist, or that the most important decision your daughter faces right now is whether she should study to be an engineer or become a sex worker, they have exited the room of serious conversation and entered the insane asylum across the board. I wish we could ignore them but they have the Zeitgeist. Stupid Zeitgeist
What I don't understand is why, outside of "because I can", people need to automate parts of life I did not know the existence of.
- Why, outside of edge cases, do people have to automate the payment of bills beyond the automatic cc processing? - How many times a month do they have to set up their barber appointment?
It seems to me that the applications of Clawd and similar tools either automate trivial stuff or work on actions and circumstances that should not be there.
As an example, the other day I had a doctor visit, and between filling forms online, filling other forms online, confirming three times I would have been there and that I filled the online forms, driving to the doctor's office, and waiting, I probably spent 2 hours of my time (the visit was 2 months after I asked for it, by the way).
The visit lasted 5-7 minutes: the doctor did not have a look at the forms I filled out beforehand, and barely listened to what I was telling him during the visit.
I worry that, since "AI" will do it, there will be more forms to be filled that nobody will read, more forms to be filled to confirm that AI or me or a guardian filled the forms, and longer wait times because AI will bombard our neurons with some entertainment.
But what I want is a visit with a doctor who listens to me, they are not in a rush, and have my problem solved. If AI helps, it's great, but I don't want busy work done by AI, I don't want, because it is not needed, busy work at all.
And that's just off the top of my head. AI is neither good or evil, but we've made some pretty poor choices deploying it.
There was also some evolutionary biology/psychology theory developed by Robert Trivers years ago on self-deception and fitness.
We buy a book thinking we are going to like it, and then we don't even open it. The recommender systems give us more of what we interact with (with some quite extreme funnel effects at times, like when we curiously look at a pimple popper video and for the next ten minutes the algo gives us pimple after pimple), but we find out, as stated but not as revealed, that we don't want more of what we interact with.
Nobody wants, in theory and as stated, to be constantly enraged by social media, but most of us, since numbers don't lie, are revealed to enjoy getting enraged.
I don't think AI will have a different effect in the near future, as the main problem is that we don't know, broadly speaking, what we want, apart from the obvious, e.g., I want to watch a football game and I am going to turn on the tv and watch it.