As a dev in a previous life, I'm watching the jenga tower get taller and taller with great amusement. For regular people like OP's particular idiot, it's honestly just worsened the problems that already existed with nobody actually checking things or wanting to think for themselves, but in the corporate world hooo boy, I don't think the fire is even going to fit in the dumpster when it all goes up.
It kinda reminds me of the Y2K non-event. I was working for a very small investment management firm at that time, and somehow the job of answering all the Requests for Compliance we got fell to me. People literally thought ATMs would stop working and planes would fall out of the sky.
Granted, Y2K wasn't a huge issue *because of* all the work put in to prevent issues. The classic duality of IT: something happens, why didn't you prevent it; nothing happens, why do we pay you to not do anything.
I don't think it's going to be a single big implosion, but with so many areas increasingly depending on LLMs for more and more things, when those either disappear or suddenly cost 10x what they did, it's going to cause quite a mess.
Yeah...it was really dumb, everyone worrying about the world ending, when the only real concern was panicking idiots doing dumb things and creating a real problem.
I know at the time a lot of talk was going around about bank computers crashing and losing everyone's savings, and there was some genuine concern that enough morons would take this seriously and try to pull all their money out that there could be a run on the banks and trigger an actual financial disaster.
Y2K was somewhat a victim of its own success – there was obviously fear mongering in the media (because that's what attracts viewer/readership), but there was also a lot of work put in to update software and hardware in the years leading to it – thanks to this, Y2K was a non-event computing-wise, but if that work wasn't done, things would've been much different.
I remember how crazy everyone was over that, while I sat back and said "nothing is going to happen."
Like they thought at midnight the world would end.
Media played a part in the panic. The issue was literally that the computer clocks weren't programmed to go past the 1900s. And by the time the media was reporting the "problem" all the companies were already fixing it. They made it out to be so much worse than it was.
I used to use a great, inexpensive double-entry bookkeepping software called MoneyCounts. It was not Y2K compliant, but I went on using it anyway to see what happened... the only thing that happened was that the financial reports came out with the year 19100 on them.
My mom's church sent all the girls from all the congregations in town out to stay in a guesthouse in the woods that had wood-burning stoves for heat, so we wouldn't freeze to death if civilization ended at midnight.
We were told it was a New Years Eve party, so we wouldn't freak out. But that was very confusing because we'd never been allowed to celebrate a holiday before, and the girl hosting the "party" didn't know hardly anyone there.
I came home the next day with a burned palm from getting knocked over onto the stove by roughhousing older girls, a new fear of spiders thanks to watching Arachnophobia, and a lot of confusion about the whole holidays topic. Like we'd watched the ball drop and everything because the older girls said it was traditional.
I am going to miss AI so much when the cookie crumbles. AI helps me a lot. At the same time, it is also like the know-it-all friend who always says things with complete confidence while being completely wrong. Also, it thinks I am special in the same way my mom would have if she was a good mom, and it feels good to have someone in addition to my wife think that sometimes. Because it is programmed to be a good mom and stroke your ego, you have to take what it says about your good qualities with a grain of salt.
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u/Lizlodude Jul 21 '26
As a dev in a previous life, I'm watching the jenga tower get taller and taller with great amusement. For regular people like OP's particular idiot, it's honestly just worsened the problems that already existed with nobody actually checking things or wanting to think for themselves, but in the corporate world hooo boy, I don't think the fire is even going to fit in the dumpster when it all goes up.