AI has a ridiculous resource cost in electricity, and so far the news on productivity gains has been mixed or uncertain. Meanwhile, OpenAI has been partially successful at trading vaporware (stock price increases) for hardware (graphics cards), which is reckless to an absurd degree and an omen of a potential bubble.

There's no question that AI is a qualitative leap in technology. But aside from specific cases like decoding ancient tablets, what exactly is produced by better google searches and faster concept iteration that we didn't have before? And whatever that is, is it worth the cost?

For example: AI is famously just as good as junior software developers, or better, at writing code. But if it costs billions of dollars to accomplish that, is it worth it? What about replacing artists and journalists that are already paid like crap anyway?

AI also has the potential to replace huge swathes of white collar, like personal assistants, secretaries, various types of managers, HR, statisticians, etc. But a lot of those jobs are female welfare in the first place, so if efficiency was the point, they would've been gone already. Does anyone believe the entire girlboss economy is going to be thrown out on its pantsuit?

Also, does anyone know how liability will be handled with AI agents? I'm pretty sure that's one of the significant reasons we don't have autonomous cars yet. Contra the name "Full Self-Driving," Tesla requires you to have hands on the steering wheel because they can offload all responsibility for your death if you take a nap in the back seat and the Tesla headbutts a tree (which has happened). Under a fully autonomous system, do they pay out the lawsuits? What kind of sanctions will come from regulatory bodies?

Somewhat related, an AI that gets things right 99% of the time would seem to be unacceptable for certain applications, like driving or medicine. For example, getting 1% of medical facts wrong, while outperforming a real doctor on average, would inevitably result in catastrophic consequences for a random member of the public and make a human check & balance necessary, which nullifies a lot of the potential efficiency advantage.

I think there is a strong possibility that we'll look at today's landscape as the good old days when virtually unlimited queries were possible for a ridiculously low cost. When AI actually has to demonstrate ROI, there may be a future where each generation costs $5, or worse.