That sounds really nice and we get to the root cause of my issue here: I don’t think that that is what will happen. I’m not saying to ban the stuff or anything but when I see how it’s being sold to the investors I’m not seeing reasonable and achievable plans of action that benefit everyone. I’m seeing gimmicks, ads, and moonshots. All while the dishonest are getting a lot out of it. I’m seeing it at its most effective being a means to increase the power of the capital holding class because that’s who’s investing in it and I don’t think that training such things will get cheaper.

And I expect them to improve yes, but I’m also concerned with methodological failures. And I’m not saying that it’ll never make life better, but right now in 2023 I’m not impressed by what I’m seeing. And that’s before I get into the realm of the tendency for trends like this to blind policy makers and business leaders. Hyper loop was sold as being for autonomous vehicles and specifically made to not be cheaply convertible to a known better solution. The whole fucking cloud computing craze comes to mind as well.

I will cede one thing here though. I do think it has a lot of room for use as one of many engineering tools to help with the design process. Being able to directly compare to known optimization methods is always going to be useful and if it can automatically plug a layout or process into a model it would be nice. Idk if I expect that to happen as well as anyone seems to think though.

I guess I just don’t trust the tech industry anymore. When I see something like LLMs it seems gimmicky as hell and a lot of early adoption is either minor or harmful. I see driverless cars getting priority over public transit over and over despite the fact that they’ve been 5 years away since I was a kid. I see people talking about using AI to help the fight against climate change from the same people who won’t quit meat. Meanwhile surveillance increases, wages stay stagnant, and the world keeps getting hotter. Contrary to how I sound I love technology. I’m an engineer for a reason. But there’s just so many reasons to feel skeptical of it. So yeah enjoy your hype. If it winds up useful for someone like me I’ll try it. But I’m not buying into the hype and I’ll be skeptical of it until I start seeing actual results.