Even if snap out of the AI bubble, we are never going to get these years back

Summary

No matter what your opinion on AI is, you probably have one already. Positive or negative, AI discourse is hard to avoid. The most dedicated AI evagenlists will tell you that: “AGI is around the corner. Your job? obsolete. You don’t think so? Well, see how much things improved from last year? imagine how it will be like in 5 years!” You’ve read everything that could be said about it already at least 10 times. I’ve seen people trying to debunk all those claims but there’s something that I rarely see. What could have been if instead of spending so much energy and resources on developing “AI features” we focused on making our existing technology better? AI gets added into every software possible nowadays. Features almost no one wants, and no one needs, that only make the existing software worse. I’m sure you know what I mean, we have all been victims of it in some way or another. (I would insert here one of those funny screenshots of Google telling you to eat rocks but you’ve seen it already) It pains me to think about all the money being funneled into the AI bubble. Money that could have funded so many real solutions to real problems. There is a lot of software to be made, improved, and released, but the tech industry refuses to see this. Tech executives are robbing every investor blind. Promising the biggest breakthrough in technology while our current technology rots to the core. The operative systems we run, the browsers we use, our critical infrastructure gets consistently neglected to chase a promised wonderland of automation that never arrives. There isn’t a single day where I don’t have to deal with software that’s broken but no one cares to fix. And I know what AI enthusiast will say: don’t worry, AI will fix them for us! On Bluesky I saw this post by Robin-Yann Storm: Gamescom’s app added an AI feature this year and it did not go well. Folks were overwhelmed with automatically generated meeting requests that they did not want. It generated a lot of stuff, but...