this post was submitted on 01 Jun 2026
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Hahah... no.
LLMs are a dead end. They will never come close to human capabilities.
I never mentioned llms specifically to avoid the misunderstanding you’ve just had, and yet here we are
Well given that's the only possible relevant "AI" you could possibly be talking about, as we don't even have an inkling about true general AI and have no technologies that even look like they could produce anything close to it, forgive me for making the obvious assumption.
No, in 20 years no version of any technology currently in use will be replacing human employees or would have the capability of doing so. AI Bros jumped the gun and tried starting to do that with current tech, and now most companies are desperately hoping just throwing more compute power at the dead ends will make it magically work before the money runs out.
Are all of the neural net projects I’ve been reading about for the last decade just llms, then?
All LLMs are neural nets, not all neural nets are llms, but they're similar enough to have the same general flaws. 'Neural Networks" are misnomers, at best; especially given the designs were first being implemented before we had any real idea how neurons actually worked. It's why Brain Organoid interfaces still completely destroy entire simulated interfaces in pretty much any task we've managed to actually train them on.
It's also how we know we're not close to the software or hardware capability to actually do anything complex. The best that we've been able to do is simulate a fly's brain with a super computer.
So, given the current rate of advancement, we’d land somewhere close to a particularly curious moth for the cost of a small apartment complex in 20 years? That actually improved my day. Thanks!
Do you think they told the fly it was living in a simulation?
Fuck I hope not
Please provide sources because you sound insane
Yes. That does seem to be the case based on the evidence before us.
That's a pretty bold statement when technology advances have replaced or downsized the need for human roles in the past.
The printing press, cars, typewriters, computers, emails and the internet, spreadsheet software and data visualization software, cloud infrastructure...
Think about what technology looked like 20 years ago. Same with the job market. The same jobs are not available to the same extent at the same equivalent rates of pay. There are new jobs that are created, for sure. But saying that technology won't advance in 20 years enough to reduce the need for human employees is short-sighted in my opinion.
...of course, that's assuming that you meant "technology won't be replacing some human employees" and not "all" employees, lol
There are many things in tech that have stagnated, or become standards that we're stuck with. But we're stuck with them not because nobody can do better, but because replacing them requires convincing the whole world to replace them.
Like email 2.0? You'd need it to be fully compatible with email 1.0, or nobody's switching. And if it is fully compatible, you're probably making compromises on how much it improves over 1.0.
On the other hand, as an end-user, my experience with email is easier than it was 20 years ago. This isn't the technology changing, but email clients making things better and more accessible for the end user.
As to your other point, we don't need "thinking machines" or "electronic telepathy" to consider the feasibility of technology replacing or reducing the need for certain types of jobs. Like I said, 20 years is a long time. Some things stay the same, yes, but many change.
20 years ago I had a 64-bit PC with a dual-core processor and 8GB of RAM, now I have a 64-bit PC with a 6-core processor and 32GB of RAM.
Sure, it's an improvement but consider the same situation from 1986 where it would have been a 386 (The first 32bit x86 chip!) with 1MB of RAM. The rate of computer technology improvements is slowing down, not increasing.
Edit: Thinking about it, 20 years ago I had a GeForce 7600 GT, which I replaced with a 570, that with a 980, and finally with a 3070. So 4 GPUs across 20 years, and they all used the same bus on the motherboard.
You're absolutely right that technology isn't accelerating as quickly as it used to.
Still, things have changed quite a bit in the last 20 years. Cloud computing, for instance, didn't need much to change in terms of the technical possibilities, or even in terms of the availability of consumer hardware. Groundbreaking changes can still happen without needing the baseline technology to improve.