COLUMNISTS
The good news? One of the worst bits, tech giants controlling it all, might soon be over
AI gets things wrong, it kills jobs, and when the bubble bursts, it will take the economy down with it. When all's said and done, however, AI will still be standing and fundamentally change our lives and work. Get used to it.
I get it. There's a lot to hate about AI. Personally, I'm both an AI user and an AI hater. Yet at the end of the day, it doesn't matter how much you or I dislike it. AI isn't going away, and it will end up stronger than ever.
Let's start from the top, shall we? First, AI has been destroying jobs and will continue to do so. Research house Forrester, for example, predicts that by 2030 AI will wipe out 10.4 million US jobs. That's 6.1 percent of all US jobs if you're counting at home. Tech companies are already filling unemployment lines with one cut after another. Amazon, Oracle, Microsoft, Meta – the list goes on and on.
Sure, some companies have finally figured out that AI can't replace as many people as the C-suite might want, so now they're hiring people back. That won't be enough to matter.
We're in for a fundamental shift in work. First, it's going to hit junior employees, like entry-level programmers. Who wants to pay money to someone fresh out of college to do work that Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, or GitHub Copilot can do? No one, that's who. In the long run, that means we won't have anyone to replace mid-level and senior developers, but businesses don't think about the long term. It's about the next quarter's almighty stock price.
The one thing that can stop this is the rising cost of AI compute. AI companies are losing money hand over fist. With the rise of token-based pricing, businesses may have to face the terrifying truth that AI can cost more than employees. Eventually, though, AI will be cost-effective and efficient enough to kill off many white-collar jobs. It just won't be as soon as many bosses want.
A related problem is that a handful of major companies currently control AI. There are a plethora of AI businesses, but I suspect many of them are dead companies walking. They're hoping to be bought out before the music stops and they're left standing. Even some of the biggest of them – I'm looking at you, OpenAI and Oracle – may go down too.
Regardless of who wins and loses, if you're using AI in the West, you're almost certainly using a proprietary model. Open weights are gaining traction, yet for now at least you're still stuck with letting Big AI look over your shoulder to cherry-pick your work and data. Don't believe me? Go take a look at your AI providers' end-user license agreement. I'll wait. Scary, isn't it?
I hope that open source AI approaches such as OpenWALDO take off. If open source doesn't, we'll be stuck in the same expensive mess as we were from the '80s through the 2010s when Microsoft ruled the desktop. If we work together, we might avoid this fate at least.
Another issue is that, thanks to AI, we're increasingly unable to tell the truth from fiction. Generative AI produces persuasive prose, images, and video regardless of accuracy. People reasonably worry about fraud, deepfakes, political manipulation, fake evidence, citation laundering, and a general erosion of confidence.
In a recent Pew's survey, 76 percent of Americans said it was very or extremely important to distinguish AI-generated content from human-created material, yet 53 percent lacked confidence that they could reliably do so. They have reason to worry. Most people can't tell the difference between facts and fiction.
I've made my living from being able to tell the difference. Just because Perplexity, which I now use for search instead of Google, tells me something doesn't mean I trust it. I prefer Perplexity because I can chase down its sources and judge whether its answer resembles the truth. Other assistants can make it harder to establish where an answer came from. AI has gotten good at coding, but it still sucks at facts, and I don't see that changing anytime soon.
The bad news, though, is that people increasingly don't give a damn about the truth. They want to be told a comforting lie. Just look at the garbage the Trump administration and its fellow travelers spew every day, and you'll see what I mean. AI is great at telling people what they want to hear. Sooner or later, though, reality has a nasty habit of slapping you in the face.
With all this, why do I think AI will eventually win? Because I've been to this rodeo before. I'm old enough to remember warnings that calculators would destroy our ability to do math, claims that word processors would never replace typewriters, and assurances that the internet would never put print media out of business. Wrong, wrong, and oh so very wrong.
Just like the technology revolutions before it, AI's benefits – ease of use, comforting lies, and eventually low prices – will overwhelm people's resistance. AI is the lazy person's answer to many problems, and you should never bet against human laziness. What are lost jobs, rising electricity costs, and datacenter pollution compared with that?
So, hate it all you want, proclaim yourself a 21st-century Luddite, and say "I told you so!" when the inevitable AI bubble pops. A decade from now, we'll all be using AI, and our kids will be wondering what all the fuss was about. ®