I find it disturbing how long people wait to accept basic truths, as if they need permission to think or believe a particular outcome will occur.

It was quite obvious that AI was hype from the get-go. An expensive solution looking for a problem.

The cost of hardware. The impact on hardware and supply chains. The impact to electricity prices and the need to scale up grid and generation capacity. The overall cost to society and impact on the economy. And that's without considering the basic philosophical questions "what is cognition?" and "do we understand the preconditions for it?"

All I know is that the consumer and general voting population loose no matter the outcome. The oligarchs, banking, government and tech-lords will be protected. We will pay the price whether it succeeds or fails.

My personal experience of AI has been poor. Hallucinations, huge inconsistencies in results.

If your day job exists within an arbitrary non-productive linguistic domain, great tool. Image and video generation? Meh. Statistical and data-set analysis. Average.

Just like .com bust from companies going online, there is hype, but there is also real value.

Even slow non-tech legacy industry companies are deploying chatbots across every department - HR, operations, IT, customer support. All leadership are already planning to cut 50 - 90% of staff from most departments over next decade. It matters, because these initiatives are receiving internal funding which will precipitate out to AI companies to deploy this tech and to scale it.