LLM Inevitabilism

If in 2009 you claimed that the dominance of the smartphone was inevitable, it would have been because you were using one and understood its power, not because you were reframing away our free choice for some agenda. In 2025 I don't think you can really be taking advantage of AI to do real work and still see its mass adaptation as evitable. It's coming faster and harder than any tech in history. As scary as that is we can't wish it away.

I’ve tried to use AI for “real work” a handful of times and have mostly come away disappointed, unimpressed, or annoyed that I wasted my time.

Given the absolutely insane hard resource requirements for these systems that are kind of useful, sometimes, in very limited contexts, I don’t believe its adoption is inevitable.

Maybe one of the reasons for that is that I work in the energy industry and broadly in climate tech. I am painfully aware of how much we need to do with energy in the coming decades to avoid civilizational collapse, and how difficult all of that will be, without adding all of these AI data centers into the mix. Without several breakthroughs in one or more hard engineering disciplines, the mass adoption of AI is not currently physically possible.

That's how people probably felt about the first cars, the first laptops, the first <anything>.

People like you grumbled when their early car broke down in the middle of a dirt road in the boondocks and they had to eat grass and shoot rabbits until the next help arrived. "My horse wouldn't have broken down", they said.

Technologies mature over time.