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https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/06/24/ai-coding-a...
https://mimetiq.substack.com/p/the-tokenmaxxing-hangover
https://fortune.com/2026/05/28/tokenmaxxing-is-dead-companie...
https://www.axios.com/2026/05/28/ai-spending-roi-enterprise-...
https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/article/big-techs-27-trill...
https://www.bok.or.kr/eng/bbs/B0000354/view.do?nttId=1009840...
https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/9/ai-intensifies-work/
AI Doesn't Reduce Work–It Intensifies It - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46955703 - February 2026 (306 comments)
https://hbr.org/2026/02/ai-doesnt-reduce-work-it-intensifies...
AI Doesn't Reduce Work–It Intensifies It - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46945755 - February 2026 (172 comments)
AI-generated “workslop” is destroying productivity? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45337253 - September 2025 (171 comments)
Seven Myths about AI and Productivity: What the Evidence Really Says - https://cmr.berkeley.edu/2025/10/seven-myths-about-ai-and-pr... - October 16th, 2025 ("Despite widespread enthusiasm for generative AI, empirical evidence reveals inconsistent productivity impacts contradicting popular assumptions. Based on recent meta-analyses and systematic reviews, we debunk seven pervasive myths about AI's workplace benefits. AI's productivity gains are highly context-dependent, varying significantly by user skill level and task complexity. Contrary to expectations, human-AI collaboration often underperforms either agent working independently, except in creative tasks. While AI can accelerate individual work, meta-analytic evidence finds no robust relationship between AI adoption and aggregate productivity gains. We call for research on context-specific organizational deployment strategies to capture genuine value.")
The GenAI Divide: State of AI in Business 2025 - https://www.artificialintelligence-news.com/wp-content/uploa... - July 2025
("extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence")
Beyond data and vibes though, I can't think of a single technology in human history that had a forced adoption quite like AI does. To the point where it should be pretty obvious to all of us that a large group of people are going to push back and be unhappy that it's disrupting their work. That doesn't mean that the people who actually like the technology wont find more productivity with it though. It's just when measured against a sea of forced adopters you'll never find a general uplifting trend. People typically don't like change.
Released only 10 months later, a tiny open-weights model outperforms what was once SOTA. Fable and 5.6 Sol will be outperformed by laptop-class models next year.
I can afford the hardware I already have. And I can run jobs on it as I see fit. Sure, its slower than the corpo LLMs, but we're already seeing lying, silent downgrading, and advertisements, even when paying for tokens.
When your systems goes tits up or priced out, mine will still work.
Right, everyone can. So now your film-making vision is simply one infinitesimally small slice of the pie that every viewer is eating. Yes, you can make a movie by yourself. Likely no one will watch it because they're too busy watching other movies made just as cheaply but by companies with marketing budgets.
> I am getting so much more work done that I'm launching easily three times what I did prior to AI tooling.
Great. Have you ever once in your life had a real conversation with a normal person where they expressed, "Man, you know what? I wish I had way more apps on my phone."
Like, yes, there is demand for software that fills unique niches, but really we are reaching saturation.
> When we have at-home Michelin star robot chefs
Eating the world's best meal, alone, while staring at your phone.
> where our cars can drive us to the beach overnight so we wake up to sunrise on the coast
This part sounds nice. Hopefully you can find parking.
> where I can have an idea for a new take on a music player tagging algorithm and just build that without it consuming weeks of my time.
Except you don't have a music player to put that algorithm in because all of the music players are closed source. You can write an open source one (or contribute to an existing one), but those all require local libraries of music, which almost no one has. Because it's not about the software, it's about the access to content.
But, really, why even bother tagging music in the first place? Just treat the tags as prompts and generate an infinite stream of music catered exactly to your mood, on demand.
I get where you're coming from. AI is a massive force multiplier for producing content. But content isn't the point of life.
The future that AI builds is one of perfect solitary meaningless hedonism. Every itch scratched, every base desire satisfied. But there is a hollow void at the center of that. Even a pet dog will lose its mind when given endless food, treats, and toys if it doesn't have an actual person to play with, and I'd like to believe we are somewhat more cognitively sophisticated than dogs.
Think back on the best meals you've ever had. I've had some very good ones. Some were memorable because of the quality of the food. But the memories of meals I hold most dear were dinners I made myself for family, not-very-good cookies my young daughter baked for me, meals shared with friends while travelling, crappy hot dogs cooked over a campfire.
It's human connection that brings us the most lasting joy, and AI is antithetical to it.
One of the supposed benefits of true self driving cars is that you never have to find parking near where you're going ever again. Get out, send your car off to park somewhere 5 miles away.
AI is orthogonal to human connection. people like people
No two things are truly orthogonal when you have to spend time to use either of them. An hour conversing with ChatGPT is an hour of your life unavailable for talking to a human.
talking to ChatGPT helps me get work done faster, so I have more time for people
cooking a meal for my friends before they arrive for dinner increases connection
Even if you use these tools to create something amazing, what keeps hundreds of variations "inspired by, but totally not copied" of your creative work from popping up? As these models get cheaper and more powerful, this issue will only get worse and worse.
it is a bad argument. more accessible tools consistently lead to more creation in a positive way
As these models get better and better, the only limiting factor is the available compute. Meanwhile data centers are being built like there's no tomorrow.
you are worrying about a hypothetical without precedent. all past evidence is that new creative tools are good
There is no precedent because the technology hasn't existed before. There's tons upon tons of precedent for companies plagiarizing the works of small artists, and the justice system sides with large companies far more often than small artists. But none of the technologies you've listed allowed companies to automatically plagiarize the works of small artists, whereas LLMs do allow this.
I’m an AI hater and the way you describe your uses sounds cool to me and like what I imagined when I was an AI optimist in the early days. The problem is that most of what it produces is still slop, the images, videos, music, and code it generates are definitely impressive but there’s something qualitatively worse about them that I can only describe as a lack of soul. Over time in a codebase, these tools create a complete mess of complexity. Those AI generated Coca Cola ads were terrible, it was just a series of cool shots with no story. The music sounds good and interesting but it’s just missing something. The writing is technically good but the voice sounds inauthentic and there’s never anything that unique or insightful in it.
I think it’ll get better though and we’ll find ways to collaborate with it that make the most of the human and AI abilities, but it seems so overhyped right now.
God forbid people have concerns over companies out in the open talking about replacing their jobs with AI.
We frankly deserve it.
You won't have any jobs in that scenario either.
The difference is that I have more faith in China to prevent mass unemployment than I do in the US.
I wouldn't. They'll just handle it differently than we would in the US.
https://tradingeconomics.com/china/unemployment-rate - It's around 5% per this (and some other sources I found, just linking the one). The population being around 1.4 billion people, that means around 70 million unemployed. That is already mass unemployment despite having a low rate of unemployment across their national population. And that's before getting to their youth unemployment rate which is around 15%, which sets them up poorly for the future.