I find it rich that this article seems to glorify the proliferation of the Internet itself, completely ignoring that social media has been driving mass addiction since the late '00s and that the rich have been growing exponentially richer long before LLMs and the like made their splash. Maybe this is because WIRED's business model requires the existing 21st century media landscape to function.

I'm not exactly an "AI optimist", but this is not constructive journalism by any means. There are countless unaddressed, explicitly tech-related issues that would only further metastasise if we arbitrarily reverted and then halted progress to 2021.

I supposed it could be argued that the proliferation of the internet lead to a massive increase in job growth.

AI, on the other hand, is seeming to (promise, at least) lead to the polar opposite.

Computers originally felt like they were going to obsolete a lot of jobs too. The Internet is just really good at delivering entertainment to people. Maybe the same thing will happen with AI.

This is the explicit and intentional promise of AI. There is no subtlety here.

Are you sure it isn't reversed? The economic conditions are such that jobs are being destroyed and AI is used as an excuse, almost a scapegoat, to fire people.

so?

so most people expect to lose more from AI than they will gain. No amount of AI is going to make up for downward mobility and lost income

Capital needs consumers, so the model will adjust to ensure that consumers can afford to pay for what they consume, or the whole thing implodes (including capital).

I can't see more productivity making us all poorer, it doesn't make sense. The world has been growing richer every decade.

It's not the same issue, but reading about this reminds me of the litany of pleasantries required for professional communication in Japanese. You can never "just ask your question".

Even in Japanese you don't need to split the question and the pleasantries into separate messages.