Continual gains that have not stopped and there is clearly much gain to be had even if model intelligence stopped scaling. I find it borderline nasty how so many people are positively hoping for a bubble to pop or an AI winter to come so that they can feel like they can cope with the evolving world...despite all evidence to the contrary that any of these things will happen very soon at all.
I'd suggest that they need better education then. Prompting isn't unskilled. Neither was googling before that. There is critical thinking involved, and the method in which you utilize the outputs that matters as well.
Yes skills are going to be devalued, but that isn't happening yet for the vast majority. So its not really apt for them to think this way.
There's at least skill needed to recognize the BS in the answers.
I've been prompting a bit on a hobby project that sort of boils down to MechE. It's far from my domain of expertise but I've recognized enough BS and been sent down some rabbit holes all too frequently to discover the BS at the end.
As a software engineer I don't think my quality of life has been improved - I now get gigantic patches to review (and I know the people writing them haven't reviewed or tested their own patches so even worse) and my tester is now drowning in big garbage patches that are taking longer to test, so my work isn't progressing either.
I have seen improvements for myself but overall it's made thing worse. While it is a HR problem (lazy employees will always be lazy, clueless manager will never deal with issues), AI has really amplified the problems. Previously, lazy employees would do their trickle of crappy work - now it's a firehose of crappy work.
Massive price increases for any electronics that contains RAM, SSDs, etc. has hurt everyone. The GPU supply crunch has hurt a smaller swath but hardly zero.
additional to the great examples already given, anyone in residential proximity to a compute centre is recieving noise + environment pollution. resultant destruction of sleep and air/water quality is massively detrimental to qol. the joes who net benefit from ai detriments seem to live far away from the consequences. I shall ask another way, how do the average joe's ai benefits outweigh his ai detriments?
Data center complaints existed long before AI. The stories you read about neighborhood issues are by and large for pre-existing data centers. This is not an AI issue
