What will happen to AI is boring old capitalism. Its staying power will come in the form of replacing competent, expensive humans with crappy, cheap robots. LLMs are a pretty good advance over Markov chains, and stable diffusion can generate images which are only somewhat uncanny with sufficient manipulation of the prompt. Mediocre programmers will use GitHub Copilot to write trivial code and boilerplate for them (trivial code is tautologically uninteresting), and ML will probably remain useful for writing cover letters for you. Self-driving cars might show up Any Day Now™, which is going to be great for sci-fi enthusiasts and technocrats, but much worse in every respect than, say, building more trains.
The biggest lasting changes from machine learning will be more like the following:
- A reduction in the labor force for skilled creative work
- The complete elimination of humans in customer-support roles
- More convincing spam and phishing content, more scalable scams
- SEO hacking content farms dominating search results
- Book farms (both eBooks and paper) flooding the market
- AI-generated content overwhelming social media
- Widespread propaganda and astroturfing, both in politics and advertising