There is a machine learning bubble, but the technology is here to stay. Once the
bubble pops, the world will be changed by machine learning. But it will
probably be crappier, not better.

Contrary to the AI doomer’s expectations, the world isn’t going to go down in
flames any faster thanks to AI. Contemporary advances in machine learning aren’t
really getting us any closer to AGI, and as Randall Monroe pointed out back in
2018:

What will happen to AI is boring old capitalism. Its staying power will come in
the form of replacing competent, expensive humans with crappy, cheap robots.
LLMs are a pretty good advance over Markov chains, and stable diffusion can
generate images which are only somewhat uncanny with sufficient manipulation of
the prompt. Mediocre programmers will use GitHub Copilot to write trivial code
and boilerplate for them (trivial code is tautologically uninteresting), and ML
will probably remain useful for writing cover letters for you. Self-driving cars
might show up Any Day Now™, which is going to be great for sci-fi
enthusiasts and technocrats, but much worse in every respect than, say,
building more trains.

The biggest lasting changes from machine learning will be more like the
following:

• A reduction in the labor force for skilled creative work
• The complete elimination of humans in customer-support roles
• More convincing spam and phishing content, more scalable scams
• SEO hacking content farms dominating search results
• Book farms (both eBooks and paper) flooding the market
• AI-generated content overwhelming social media
• Widespread propaganda and astroturfing, both in politics and advertising

AI companies will continue to generate waste and CO₂ emissions at a
huge scale as they aggressively scrape all internet content they can find,
externalizing costs onto the world’s digital infrastructure, and feed their
hoard into GPU farms to generate their models. They might keep humans in the
loop to help with tagging content, seeking out the cheapest markets with the
weakest labor laws to build human sweatshops to feed the AI data monster.

You will never trust another