People ask me where all this is going.
Will machines become smarter than us? Will AI take my job? Should I be worried?
They usually expect a confident answer, probably because I spend a lot of time working with these tools.
The honest answer is less impressive.
I don’t know.
And neither does anyone else, at least not with the certainty some headlines, keynotes, and press releases would like us to believe.
There are thoughtful, serious people who think we are only a few years away from something extraordinary. There are equally thoughtful, serious people who think the current wave of AI will eventually run into limits we are underestimating.
Both camps have been wrong before.
That does not make them foolish. It simply means the future has a bad habit of refusing to follow the script.
A few things I would have dismissed not long ago now work surprisingly well.
A few things I was convinced were just around the corner are still standing somewhere around that same corner, apparently in no hurry to arrive.
My own record at predicting AI is probably about as good as everyone else’s.
Not great.
So I try to treat the really big questions the way I treat a weather forecast three weeks ahead.
Interesting.
Worth checking.
Probably not enough reason to cancel dinner.
What interests me more is the next twelve months.
That horizon feels slightly less theatrical.
I can watch which tools people around me are actually using. I can see what has changed at work over the last quarter. I can notice which tasks suddenly became easier, which services became cheaper, and which “revolutionary” feature quietly disappeared because nobody cared.
That is usually where the real story is.
The future does not always arrive with a dramatic soundtrack.
Quite often, it sneaks in through small updates, lower prices, better interfaces, faster workflows, and habits we adopt without even noticing.
And those boring little changes matter.
Because that is where decisions get made.
If someone gives you a very confident forecast about AI, in either direction, be a little suspicious.
Not of them.
Of the confidence.