AI is only different if it reaches a hard takeoff state and becomes self-aware, self-motivated, and self-improving. Until then it's an amazing productivity tool, but only that. And even then we're still decades away from the impact being fully realized in society. Same as the internet.
In fact the current trends suggest its impact hasn't fully played out yet. We're only just seeing the internet-native generation start to move into politics where communication and organisation has the biggest impact on society. It seems the power of traditional propaganda centres in the corporate media has been, if not broken, badly degraded by the internet too.
Internet did not take away jobs (only relocated support/SWE from USA to India/Vietnam)
these AI "productivity" tools straight up eliminating jobs. and in turn wealth that otherwise supported families, humans, and powered economy. it is directly "removing" humans from workforce and from what that work was supporting.
Do we not have any sense of wonder in the world anymore? Referring to a system which can pass the Turing test as a "amazing productivity tool" is like viewing human civilization as purely measured by GDP growth.
Probably because we have been promised what AI can do in science fiction since before we were born, and the reality of LLMs is so limited in comparison. Instead of Data from Star Trek we got a hopped up ELIZA.
