AI is changing the world and has changed the world already.
See, AI is a field... and it's also a buzzword: once a technology passes out of fashion and becomes part of the fabric of computing, it is no longer called AI in the public imagination. GOFAI techniques, like rules engines and propositional-logic inference, were certainly considered AI in the 1970s and 1980s, and are still used, they're just no longer called that.
The statistical methods behind machine learning, transformers, and LLMs are certainly game changers for the field. Whether they will usher in a revolutionary new economy, or simply be accepted as sometimes-useful computation techniques as their limitations and the boundaries of their benefits become more widely known, remains to be seen but I think it will be closer to the latter than the former.
See, AI is a field... and it's also a buzzword: once a technology passes out of fashion and becomes part of the fabric of computing, it is no longer called AI in the public imagination. GOFAI techniques, like rules engines and propositional-logic inference, were certainly considered AI in the 1970s and 1980s, and are still used, they're just no longer called that.
The statistical methods behind machine learning, transformers, and LLMs are certainly game changers for the field. Whether they will usher in a revolutionary new economy, or simply be accepted as sometimes-useful computation techniques as their limitations and the boundaries of their benefits become more widely known, remains to be seen but I think it will be closer to the latter than the former.