Reality check: normies' AI views are detached — top results go to those who delegate hardest
Revolutionalredstone · reddit · 2026-09-20
A long r/singularity post offering a reality check on how average people see AI:
- Public opinion is stuck between two extremes: "everyone will soon realize how dumb it is" and "it's crap, but it'll take our jobs anyway" — both increasingly detached from reality, the author argues.
- The capability gap is huge: many of his highly paid developer friends never use AI, while the smartest, most effective people he knows get world-class results from coding models. The difference is unusual effort to make the machine match their vision and taste — possibly the new edge/talent.
- Circular reasoning: the main reason non-users give for not using AI is believing it wouldn't work — what's "literally holding society up." Like TCP and C, AI will change the world without being understood by average people.
- Valuations aren't absurd: IBM and peers reached huge valuations employing human programmers vastly slower and costlier than AI.
- White-collar work trending toward redundancy: devs now compete to be the person who hands the company's task to AI; technical skill barely differentiates — what matters is how systematically you delegate and how much responsibility you'll give the machine.
Opinion-heavy and deliberately provocative, but a representative snapshot of power-user mentality.
More from AGI Musings
- Nature commentary: universities must stop protecting academic bullies or lose more scientists — skoularidou · 2026-09-20
- AI Debater: Distinguish First-Principles ASI Risk From Today's Regulatory Noise — JOBhakdi · 2026-09-20
- As Agents Start Choosing Products, GEO Replaces SEO as the New battleground — nikvassev · 2026-09-20
- Former AI safety skeptic: the 'preposterous' predictions are already coming true — dan_s_becker · 2026-09-20
- "Four Rivers of Computing": a personal syllabus for stealing pioneers' moves — threepointone · 2026-09-20
- Millennium problems become 'low-hanging fruit' once AI solves them, author laments — haider1 · 2026-09-20