The best “AI” – well, LLMs, let’s call them by their real name – right now are behind corporate subscriptions.
That tells me everything I need to know about “the future of AI”; it will be used to extract rent from everyone who can do meaningful knowledge work because they will be afraid that their colleague is going to be faster and better than them if they don’t use the LLM. A classic race to the bottom / rat race. Chaos and game theories tell us – and proved it with historical examples – that this spirals down at an accelerating rate until the system crashes and burns.
I for one am not impressed by the normalization of this extreme rent-seeking.
And if artificial super-intelligence indeed emerges, I’ll panic. Severely so. These agents will serve the worst of humanity at the cost of everyone else. So much awful practices in hiring and work have been normalized in the last 10-15 years, that some dystopia sci-fi authors are likely hugely impressed that even their bleak novels missed the mark by such a big margin. 
And if ASI comes to existence? Multiply those terrible practices by 100x. Even movies like Blade Runner and games like Cyberpunk 2077 and series like Ghost In The Shell will seem tame and optimistic. I would argue we already live in cyberpunk… but we don’t have the choice to get cool and powerful body implants. We only got the worst parts of it.
I believe the AI area has true potential, but only if it’s forcefully plucked out of the hands of the psychopathic mega-capitalist owner class first. Only if LLMs become libre do we as a civilization have a chance to collectively enact a true positive change in the world.
Before that happens – if it ever happens – we are just very predictably moving to an extremely bleak future. The people who own stuff have proven, time and again, that they are not interested in the well-being of the rest of us.
