General Discussion

I have over the years, seen the same claims made for everything from networks to desktop publishing to the Internet, mobile phones, cloud computing, data science, self-driving vehicles, drones, the Internet of Things, the metaverse, bitcoin, and generative AI. The same breathless claims, the same impacts, the same FOMO. In almost every case, the hype collapsed into investors losing millions or billions of dollars, a lot of technical people were fired because they just "won't be needed anymore", and then, a few years later, a quiet hiring spree occurs because it turns out that "fill in the blank" technology really doesn't solve everything. GenAI/Agentic Programming/etc. is on the exact same trajectory. In the end, a couple of big companies will go out of business because they couldn't fulfill their promises or were involved in shady accounting that caught up with them, and most of what had been touted as the wave of the future became commodity software or hardware. It will still be there - AI isn't going to go away - but I see it eventually becoming ubuquitous and probably heavily distributed.