While I have no doubt that individual companies, such as OpenAI for example, will eventually introduce enshittification features, I doubt the industry as a whole can be summarized that easily.

I believe, over all, development will go forward and things will get better. A rising tide lifts all ships, even if some of them decide to be shitty leaking vessels. If nothing else we always have open source software to fall back on when the enshittification of the proprietary models start.

For a practical example: The cars we drive today are a lot better than 100 years ago. A bad future isn't always inevitable.

But are cars we drive today better than they were 10 years ago? 20 years ago? Reliability is now trending down for cars, safety is questionable as deaths and injuries have been steadily increasing for a number of years now. Features are getting converted to subscriptions, and they all constantly send back telemetry.

Good points!