I just don't understand people working on improving ai. It just isn't worth the risk.
A cynical/accelerationist perspective would be: it enables you to rake in huge amounts of money, so no matter what comes next, you will be set up to endure it better than most.
I’m younger than most on this site. I see the next decades of my life being defined by a multi-generational dark age via a collapse in literacy (“you use a calculator right?”), median prosperity (the only truly functional distribution system we have figured out is labor), and loss of agency (kinda obvious). This outcome is now, as of 2026, essentially priced into the public markets and accepted as fact by most media outlets.
“It’s inevitable” is at least a hard point to argue with. “Well I’M so productive, I’m having the time of my life”, the dominant position in many online tech spaces, seems short-sighted at best.
I miss being a techno optimist, it’s much more fun. But it’s increasingly hard.
Every generation has its strains and the internet just amplifies it because outrage is currency. Those strains are things you only start to notice as you start to get older so they seem novel when in reality in the scheme of humanity is basically standard.
Fwiw if the market actually priced it in it would be in freefall since the market would be shortly irrelevant. We are due for a correction soon though.
Internet discourse is a facsimile of real life and often not how real life operates in my experience.
So I see all the discourse around extremes on either end and based on lived experience and working in the field think theres a much neater middle ground we'll ultimately arrive at thanks to people working very hard to land the plane so to speak.
How will this technology be good for humanity as a whole?
That said, trivially we already see it advancing math and science research as an assistive tool, development and more. Extrapolate it out a few more generations and it helps us unlock a whole bunch of things on the skill tree of life so to speak.