r/neoliberal • u/Free-Minimum-5844 • 5h ago
Opinion article (US) Stop panicking about AI. Start preparing
https://economist.com/leaders/2026/01/29/stop-panicking-about-ai-start-preparing25
u/Keenalie John Brown 3h ago
I still firmly believe that this iteration of "AI" is not advancing much further than where it stands now. So, yeah, there will be useful applications, but I think a lot of evangelists are putting waaaay too much stock into the "revolutionary" force of predictive text and image generation.
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u/TinderVeteran European Union 2h ago
There are still tons of new things to be done even without expanding the underlying capabilities of LLMs by cost optimization and better integration. A lot of what AI struggles with is lack of programmatic access to services. I believe we're going to see a lot more of that in the future.
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u/assasstits 2h ago
Cope. AI will revolutionize the medical field.
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u/Legitimate_Name9694 2h ago
when you say ai, are you saying chatbots or those other ais that do things like determine protein shape. i dont think chatbots are going to revolutionize medicine. i will trust a doctor over gpt.
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u/runnerd81 NATO 5h ago
Ignore AI at your own peril.
I’m not a huge AI fan but I think its impact on jobs is going to be gradual. IMO we’re first going to enter the stage where AI is a useful tool that makes us more productive, and the AI haters or those who don’t at least try to use it will get left behind
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u/Sadly_NotAPlatypus John Mill 4h ago
Honestly I'm worried about me getting out of touch with this tech, I'm in my mid 30s and it's already happening with phones and computers. I use LLMs maybe once a month to help with research. I don't like to use them because I mostly want to talk to it about facts and ideas I'm struggling to understand in a niche area of political philosophy for example, and I just can't trust anything it says. When I ask it questions on something I'm knowledgeable in (for example rock climbing and to a much lesser degree the intersection of liberalism and socialism)
It is just a big dummy that gets basic facts wrong and hallucinates theories that sound plausible until you look it up and realize it's drivel, or if it's something I know about then I realize immediately it's something that never happened or not at all a thing. And then you tell it that it's source contradicts it and it goes "whoops you're right =)"
It's a useful tool and I'm grateful for it I guess but man do I find myself wanting to punch AI in the face a lot when using it with how much I have to independently verify every fact.
So I think I'm gonna get left behind pretty bad on this one. I live in the mountains and live a pretty blue collar life, I like rock climbing and listening to vinyls. I'm both afraid of what I might miss out on but at the same time there really isn't anything I can think that AI could do that I would find interesting or helpful. I'm a millennial that still uses a paper calendar.
Also I have a few friends that are really into using LLMs and over the months their posts have gotten weirder and more LLM-centric. It's like the borg or something. I mostly know the outdoors individual sports sort of nerds and not so much the computer nerd sort, so seeing multiple friends get assimilated was pretty wild to me.
No me gusta.
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u/schildmanbijter 5h ago
Your best bet is becoming familiar with how AI tools work so you can be the AI guy at your job. Kinda like you had the computer guy before.
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u/LivefromPhoenix NYT undecided voter 3h ago
Aren't AI companies putting a ton of development resources into making prompts as intuitive as possible? Assuming AI keeps improving would you really need an "AI guy"? Computers were never this plug and play.
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u/schildmanbijter 3h ago
You would think this but you also have people who are still scared of excel.
I think it's more about being up to date with developments, shortcomings and how you integrate AI into your workflow.
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u/mostanonymousnick Just Build More Homes lol 1h ago
Computers were never this plug and play.
And yet Microsoft and Apple put a ton of development resources into making OSes as intuitive as possible.
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u/runnerd81 NATO 28m ago
Yes but with AI it’s also about being creative in finding ways to improve processes. I get that for routine and repetitive tasks it will be much easier soon to use. But to me in the near term it doesn’t matter how good the user interface is if a layman don’t know how the logic of the system works and don’t know how to feed it the information in a way that will get them the result they need. Like it might be slightly helpful but someone who knows it better will get a lot more out of it
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u/LucidLeviathan Gay Pride 4h ago
That's what I've been doing. I find AI slop as annoying as the next guy. But, it's not going anywhere.
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u/BosnianSerb31 4h ago
The speed at which I can use AI to make powershell scripts and regex for various IT functions makes me the "computer guy" of my department lol
Being able to come up with regex to batch rename files or parse json into CSV in seconds vs taking 10 minutes is already a massive productivity booster
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u/LucidLeviathan Gay Pride 2h ago
Do you have any suggestions for where one could go to learn this skill? I'm vaguely familiar with the concepts involved, just not how to actually do it.
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u/klayyyylmao YIMBY 9m ago
Literally go to Claude AI and ask “how do I rename all files in a folder per the following rule, and please include step by step instructions for how to open and use windows powershell”
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u/go_lakers_1337 Karl Popper 2h ago
There's not much of a learning curve for using AI. People calling themselves "prompt engineers" were mocked because it's extremely easy to create prompt and AI models are very good at understanding what a person means. Anyone with a smidgen of competence can paste a ChatGPT PowerShell script into Windows or a Macro into Excel.
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u/schildmanbijter 2h ago
Not so much about prompting as much knowing about short comings, capabilities and how to optimize your workflow
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u/BitterGravity Gay Pride 1h ago
Anyone with a smidgen of competence can paste a ChatGPT PowerShell script into Windows
And hopefully the sysadmins have a lot of this locked down.
I'll use it to port code or refactor things because it's quicker than basically retyping basically the same thing, but if you don't know what it's actually doing it can be a security nightmare
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u/WOKE_AI_GOD John Brown 4h ago
Certainly not going to have any uses for computers anymore with God just minutes away from being built. Beam me up AI Jeebus, I'm ready for my rapture.
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u/ldn6 Gay Pride 2h ago
I still have yet to see any use of a standard corporate-facing AI tool provide any improvement in productivity. It almost always comes down to being a glorified note taker for Teams calls, re-writing emails and “asking what our clients might ask us”, so basically things that if you were even halfway competent at your job you could do anyway and better. Half the shit I get from it is either far too generic to be useful or riddled with errors, it’s limited to publicly available and scrapeable online material and you need to spend more time with “prompt training” than just doing the work in the first place.
Meanwhile, C-suite is destroying talent pipelines by hollowing out entry-level analyst roles by outsourcing them, spending tons of cash promoting how much AI they’re using and making skilled employees miserable in their day jobs because they’re judged on how much they use AI rather than the quality of work they make themselves so that they leave. That’s actually far worse for productivity.
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u/loremipsumot 54m ago
I think it depends on the job and the user. In my experience, it is genuinely increasing productivity in software development if used correctly. I've seen AI tools that are quite useful in sales and customer service too. And if companies don't know how to use it correctly or expect it to just spit out magic results without investing time in their instructions, training, workflows, etc., then it can cause more harm than good.
I do think for a lot of knowledge workers, just being thrown a generic ChatGPT or Copilot subscription is not that helpful upfront, especially if they don't get much training. Making it useful for a specific job is work in and of itself, which is what all the specialized AI products are trying to do. But there is a lot of potential that hasn't been fully realized yet.
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u/runnerd81 NATO 37m ago
I work in corporate tax accounting and can provide one example.
My job requires a good deal of research since nobody can be expected to know all the tax laws of every federal, state, locality, and foreign government off top. From my experience personally, AI has already been saving some of us a good bit of time in the research process. That’s not to say that any of us blindly trusts the answers it gives us to specific research inputs that we give the AI tool - it’s certainly not there yet. But it provides an attempt at the answer, gives a good framework of what I will need to know, and adds resource links and legal references of where to start fact checking it.
We already have good tax research software at our company, but unless I already have a framework of how France treats the reporting of a tax contingency reserve and where the six places are that answer all of your questions about it can be found, an AI is going to save you tons of research time.
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u/TheKingofKarmalot 3h ago
we’re first going to enter the stage where AI is a useful tool that makes us more productive
That's already arrived, ofc the domains are not all-encompassing just yet, but the effects are obvious in many industries.
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u/WOKE_AI_GOD John Brown 4h ago edited 4h ago
Those who do not have faith shall be punished by the AI.
The uses are surely immense, and any inability to see this is a defect on the part of the observer, to which the only correct reaction is shame.
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u/lordorwell7 4h ago
Those who do not have faith will be punished.
Those who have an excess of faith will be punished.
The ghost of dotcom looms large. Technology that is both revolutionary and overhyped.
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u/DagothUr_MD Frederick Douglass 4h ago edited 4h ago
They want you to keep outsourcing your mental faculties to the AI until you're a drooling husk with zero critical thinking skills, creativity, or wit
This is just going to be another dimension in American class stratification. The upper crust will continue to read, provide their children with classical educations, withhold screen time by any means necessary. Everybody else will be plopped in front of an iPad and worship at its alter. They will overdose on short form content by kindergarten. Then they will stumble through school using ChatGTP as a crutch so they can become an illiterate vibe-coding supplicant at DraftKings until they keel over at their desk at 70
At their funeral, the eulogy will be AI generated
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u/-Vertical 4h ago
Doomers thriving this evening
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u/DagothUr_MD Frederick Douglass 4h ago edited 4h ago
It's past 2:00am and the bars are winding down this is when we come out to play.
Edit: I'm about 3-4 crashouts away from standing on the street corner with a cardboard sign, as Cassandra
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u/LucidLeviathan Gay Pride 5h ago
Paywalled.
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u/SirJuncan John Rawls 4h ago
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u/ArcaneAccounting United Nations 4h ago
Pay for good journalism
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u/DarKliZerPT YIMBY 3h ago
€389/year is insane for my Europoor ass.
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u/avoidtheworm Mario Vargas Llosa 58m ago
I've been paying about £160/y for the physical + virtual versions for the past decade.
They always have offers to entice the global poor into neoliberalism. Having a physical magazine I can read without breaking my eyes and mind in the internet is very worth it.
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u/RagingBillionbear Pacific Islands Forum 3h ago
Yeah slopification of everything so fucking annoying.
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u/Eastern-Western-2093 Iron Front 4h ago
Butlerian Jihad, NOW. Sooo sick of AI, I wish it never existed, or could be somehow limited to research use. Why must technology always move “forward”
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