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I think this is short sighted. We are at the infancy stages of what these things can do, and judging what will be true in 5-10 years based on brand new technology is a fool’s errand. In 1992, only the true dreamers imagined the internet as always on, available, and in everyone’s pockets. Outside of the optimistic futurists, you would not have predicted Űber, DoorDash, Grubhub, or the like. We had an early version of online shopping in the form of Service Merchandise (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service_Merchandise) in which you could drive to the store and order things from a kiosk. People seeing things like that and the big clunky desktops connected to dialup modems would think someone talking about hailing a cab over the internet was a kook.
And I’ll mention that a lot of the anti-hype is often not only based on early versions on AI, but it seems quite often on wishful thinking and a high view of what it is they actually do. Journalism isn’t that difficult provided to have the facts at hand. The format and conventions of writing for the news are not difficult. In fact, I don’t think most business writing is super difficult to learn. AI could probably write something that would be indistinguishable from a human written article or business paper. I’d give fiction writing 10-15 years tops if we’re talking about median genre fiction. Art bot ai can already produce stuff that’s easy enough to edit into something you could use as graphic art. The new Sora could probably create a commercial in ten years. But a lot of people just don’t want to believe that their entire profession could be automated so they comfort themselves that AI chatbot can’t do their job and therefore it’s safe.
It's rather goofy that you lead with a sentence saying how it's essentially impossible to predict the future of tech, then you... do exactly that, but in the other direction. Obviously there's very wide error bars here on both sides, but I don't think accurately predicting an impending tech revolution is any easier than predicting a tech fizzle as you seem to implicitly think.
There have also been a bunch of failures like VR, NFTs, the Metaverse, and Crypto (as more than just a medium for fraud and bigger-fool speculation). Even self-driving cars seem decades away from mass adoption. The number of tech startup failures dwarfs the amount of success stories by at least an order of magnitude. As such, I believe our Bayesian priors should be calibrated towards pessimism in general, only veering towards cautious optimism for the most promising possibilities.
Promises of "it's only just begun, surely the next version will be even better which will lead to mass adoption" were used for all those listed failures, but improvements either didn't manifest, or were so marginal as to be irrelevant.
A lot of the pro-hype arguments here are based less on historical technological developments, and more on wishful thinking that it would somehow hurt their outgroup. "Your days are numbered, journalist!" is a pretty good example.
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