These warnings about AI sound right to me. As a software engineer, it just seems weird to look around and see how much hype there is about AI compared to how much tangible benefit there is to using it in a serious way. Every software company seems to be trying to be involved in it under orders from the top. Companies are putting huge amounts of time and money into trying to find ways to use AI technologies but they don't know what or how they actually want it to do. Everyone seems to be desperately trying to stay relevant with the hot current thing but nobody knows what they're trying to get out of it. Tech people are being pressured by bosses to use AI and so we all spend loads of time looking at it, and every so often someone comes up with something like "maybe an AI chatbot could filter our support tickets" which when you think about it isn't particularly impressive or futuristic at all, but it's often as good as you get, so people run with it and spend time on that. Every company-wide call we have someone enthusiastically talks about the exciting new AI stuff we've got coming up but there's never any concrete examples.
There are undoubtedly very powerful things you can do with AI around specific things like spotting patterns, which can have massive benefits in things like study of disease; probably scientific research in general. But this big push for every consumer to use AI and every piece of software to incorporate it just seems out of touch with reality.
