Ask HN: What if no AIpocalypse, no AI bubble, what if it just keeps advancing?

5 points by consumer451 · 11 comments
The two mainstream arguments are the extremes, because that's how our modern society rolls. It's either that there is an AI bubble that will crash, or that a rogue ASI will kill us all.

What about the third possibility? What if GPT 3.5 -> Sonnet 3.5 -> Opus 4.5 -> Astra / Opus 5.5 just keeps going for the next few years? Based on my experience, that will eat all software and software-related meetings. Once lab researchers focus on fields other than software, they will eat those nearly as quickly.

This feels like the real contrarian position in 2026. What does the US economy, which is >70% service-based, look like in the next 3 to 5 years, if this happens?

Does a couple labs having control of that percentage of the GDP make an economy? What if it happens too quickly? Is this the real reason why they are talking about "pacing the frontier" all of a sudden? Maybe this impossible "pacing" is due to the fact that the labs' own economists pointed out that collapsing your country's economy might not be a good idea?

What does unemployment look like in the next few years in this scenario, in the USA?

11 comments

andsoitis
> will eat all software and software-related meetings.

Software engineering is a job. Writing code is a task. The task isn't the job.

i_have_an_idea
copium
techblueberry
Copium seems like the rational response to the loss of millions of job, stability, and the meaning of one’s life.

Billions of people are going to become impoverished and your reaction is to insult someone for grieving?

What do you think is the purpose of life? Is this how you’ll react as one by one the souls of the ones you love most go dark?

clint
Do you honestly think writing code is the purpose of life? Do you think meaningless drudgery is the meaning of life?
techblueberry
Yes. Please enlighten me otherwise.
tripleee
Copium isn't a rational response - it's an emotional one, and it's putting yourself in a worse position than if you view things more clearly and can plan accordingly.
techblueberry
Against superhuman AI, people are planning accordingly for their irrelevance.
andsoitis
What’s the point if shouting and spreading pessimism?
pierreb-aiva
Until models have taste, we still need Software Engineers to judge their output in the context of a broader goal. Not saying this will never happen, but we have yet to see evidence of models getting good at this. If anything, the lack of improvement on that axis has been quite underwhelming; the latest example of that being OpenAI offering a Lean proof of the solutions to the Navier-Stokes equations, but that proof not matching the natural language of that proof [1].

[1] https://arxiv.org/html/2610.08144v1

dormento
my 2c:

IMHO, the US is already cooked. Technological superiority is one of many ways to exert influence, and foreign initiatives are closing in, fast. There's nothing the US can do do stop it, unless it can find a way to stall China's advances in the area, and this is incredibly unlikely.

techblueberry
How are you defining “AI bubble”? Via the capability trajectory of AI or as an economic analysis. How is “AI bubble” an extreme? Was dotcom bubble an extreme? In retrospect it feels like a median position. Bubbles are super normal not extreme. “AI is useless and will go away” would be the extreme position. Your third possibility could happen in the “AI bubble” world.

I think “AI bubble” gets framed as a technological question about AI capabilities and not a financial one. The bubble may deflate slowly, but if you eat all software or eat all other Field’s something is popping. Anthropic OpenAI and SpaceX are all valued partially as if they’ll be the only ones to succeed.