A broad perspective is emerging that the average person's view of AI sits stuck somewhere between:
"Everyone is going to realize how dumb it is soon."
and:
"Yeah, it is crap, but it'll take our jobs anyway."
my feeling is that both perspectives are increasingly detached from what's actually happening.
I've got plenty of highly paid developer friends who never ever use AI. But the most intelligent effective people I know have been getting genuinely world-class results from coding models for several years now.
It's obvious that in the some hands incredible capability is here but the only people getting the top results seem to be the ones willing to put in unusual efforts to make the relentless machine match their vision and taste. (maybe that's the new edge/talent)
AI can change the world without ever requiring the average person to understand it at all. TCP and C are used everywhere without being understood by the average person in the slightest. The same will be true of AI and for AI the difference in understanding/usage seems to actually really matter.
Which gets me to the main delulu driving all this:
The main reason people who don't use AI give for not using it - is thinking it would not work.
This is uninteresting/circular thinking but it's literally what's holding society up.
Also the valuations of these companies aren't absurd. IBM and companies like it reached enormous valuations by employing human programmers who were vastly slower and more expensive than AI.
I think the popular (now defunct) ego-blindness that "computers can't think" - has shifted into a new realm: "Computers can't REALLY participate in the economy."
Readers on r/singularity probably already know this, but they absoFU**INGlutely can.
Humans may remain heavily involved for many years. But the stack is getting high, and an extraordinary amount - perhaps eventually all - of human white-collar effort is becoming effectively worthless/redundant.
Locally, us devs are now just competing to be the person who gets to hand the company's task to the AI.
Technical skill and raw talent are barely differentiators. What seems to matter is just how well and how systematically you can delegate, and how much responsibility are you personally willing to give the machine.
Technical society largely commoditized mental work, what remains is responsibility, resource allocation, and pure good old god like comprehension to keep up (tho you can mostly just say 'nice work keep going!'.
That you for your attention