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

13 pointsby consumer45128 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?

sdevonoes[3 comments hidden]
That it will make a few individuals even more ultra mega rich. And then they will have even more power to adjust the world as they see fit.
infamouscow[2 comments hidden]
Good to know that nothing has changed.
vconnor[hidden]
Something will have changed: you’ll be poorer, they’ll be richer. It is a common fallacy to assume you’ll get to keep your Westerner middle class standard of living.
atleastoptimal[4 comments hidden]
If AI keeps advancing it will eclipse humans in all domains. This has been predicted for over a hundred years and it is a reasonable extrapolation from current trends.

Existing among machines more capable than humans in all domains is not a stable outcome. Either AI is significantly curtailed and restricted, or humans are consumed by the machines or disassembled for spare carbon.

consumer451[3 comments hidden]
I think that you might still be going with the exciting extremes, p(doom) style.

What about p(economic-collapse)? i.e. p(boring)

Where is the discussion by economists on the latter, as that appears to be exactly where we are headed, nearly for sure?

The Economic Nobel exists after all. Shouldn't there be a very public fight over the future on this topic?

fzzzy[2 comments hidden]
Doesn't p(economic collapse) go without saying from the point gp makes?
consumer451[hidden]
I suppose it does. I was thinking that we just need to put this all into more obvious AI Implications for Dummies style terms, so that the non-tech public understands. Subject matter experts love to get overly-specific to the point where it all sounds silly to others. Meanwhile, your social feeds love extremes.

It seems like the boring truth just gets lost in the middle.

Using anthropogenic climate change as an analogy, people talk about: it's fake, or 1.5C meh, or maybe Venus! I only recently started to phrase the problem as "what if we just burn all known fossil fuel reserves?" - that is the economic path we are on. Turns out, if we do that, it's >6C and utter catastrophe that we are waltzing into. That should have been the story the entire time, right?

Communication on these topics is not easy, and seems important. We need much better PR for these difficult problems. It's tough just to describe what is plainly happening when there are trillion dollar industries working against reality.

andsoitis[12 comments hidden]
> 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[11 comments hidden]
copium
techblueberry[6 comments hidden]
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[2 comments hidden]
Do you honestly think writing code is the purpose of life? Do you think meaningless drudgery is the meaning of life?
techblueberry[hidden]
Yes. Please enlighten me otherwise.
tripleee[3 comments hidden]
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[2 comments hidden]
Against superhuman AI, people are planning accordingly for their irrelevance.
andsoitis[hidden]
What’s the point of shouting and spreading pessimism?
pierreb-aiva[4 comments hidden]
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

consumer451[3 comments hidden]
OK, but in my experience, ~90% of the software dev economy is CRUD and boilerplate. A very tiny percentage of the dev economy was ever doing anything novel, if you really think about it.

So, this is an interesting question. If "taste" still gives advantage for now, what does that do to the rest of the boilerplate dev economy, which I am still sure was >90% of the entire thing?

What does "taste" even mean? The only taste that matters is PMM taste. Coding is solved, unless you are doing something truly novel.

So, if we can discount 90% of the boilerplate devs, and the 10% can just use tokens.... I mean is anyone denying that we are doing this right now, and killing the entire jr dev ladder???

Am I still really having this conversation right now in 2026? Isn't all of this extremely obvious by now?

pierreb-aiva[2 comments hidden]
Technical ability != building something people want, will use on a daily basis, and provides economic value or enjoyment for humans. Models have been trained to be superhuman at the former, not the latter. Taste is what allows humans to do the latter.

Therefore, until taste can be programmed as a reward function in RL, or we have demonstrated that scaling RL improves model generalisation to such an extent that we don't need to create that reward function,

> Coding is solved, unless you are doing something truly novel.

Agreed. And even then, AI are sometimes better at humans at finding solutions to problems humans can't (e.g. Navier Stokes equations). But that still doesn't mean all tasks of the job are done (though obviously the definition of the job have and will continue changing as the tech improves).

consumer451[hidden]
I believe that we generally agree.

> Technical ability != building something people want, will use on a daily basis, and provides economic value or enjoyment for humans. Models have been trained to be superhuman at the former, not the latter. Taste is what allows humans to do the latter.

I think finally learned of the role title and the audiobook to teach me about this. It will also be replaced, but one of the last "tech" roles to be automated. It's where the taste lives, right?

Role: Product Marketing Manager - with a tech background and agentic dev skills (although the last part is most fleeting)

Book: Obviously Awesome

If anyone else would care to educate me about this here, please and thank you!

dormento[hidden]
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.

tavavex[hidden]
> 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.

I don't understand your framing, because this is far more apocalyptic than any old bubble burst, even if the bubble is a massive one. A crash due to a bubble causes a temporary setback and readjustment that slowly rebounds over time. Fully displacing even 20% of the workforce would likely cause a societal implosion on a never before seen scale. Now imagine how bad it would be if it's 30, 40 or 50% of the workforce. Full automation is not temporary, it would remove these jobs for good. There is no rebound to be had, and only a mass restructuring of society that we all know is not likely to happen would save us from near-total collapse. I don't think AI labs have much of a reason to pace themselves to prevent this, because they're the ones who will come out on top in that poorer, more desperate, more divided hypothetical future.

nitwit005[5 comments hidden]
Perhaps look at the past dozens of discussions on this general idea.
consumer451[4 comments hidden]
One would hope that there were many thousands of examples of this exact discussion. If you could point me to some of your favorites, I would appreciate it.
nitwit005[3 comments hidden]
You are perhaps not getting the hint that I'm suggesting you should put in a bit of effort.
consumer451[2 comments hidden]
I am literary trying to learn here. Explain to me like I am the moron you think I am. Give me a single link, a search phrase, anything please.

In the nicest tone possible: otherwise, what was the point of your comment?

nitwit005[hidden]
You can ask Google for similar discussions to your post, given a link to the post, and that works.
mstaoru[hidden]
I might be a bit pessimistic but not extreme.

It's not "AI bubble that will crash" but definitely some kind of deflation or correction that will damage a lot of investments. As always, common people will be most affected.

It's not "rogue ASI will kill us all" but advancements in cyberattacks, skill erosion, job loss that will damage us all. Again, common people will be most affected.

It's been 5-6 years with these things, how does anyone still believe that this will usher a new era of prosperity? Maybe for Sam and Dario.

techblueberry[hidden]
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.