Please stop pushing the "getting left behind" fear. Prompting is not a skill, there is nowhere it's going that it can leave anyone behind. The "skill" of prompting is 100% dependent on one's skill programming, and in a day the skilled programmer will be able to surpass the guy that's been vibecoding for a decade.

You could say something similar about the internet really, and the worst we get is some AWS or Cloudflare outage, no? People joke about various services being down but it's nothing too ridiculous, and unlikely to impact every provider simultaneously.

Nah. "the internet" or "the power grid" sure, but "AI" being down for an extended period of time would mostly just cause the stock market to shit the bed and trickle down effects from that, but not any actual loss in productivity. We did a lot of things 3 years ago believe it or not, and we'd just go back to working like that after some adjustments. (To be fair, I literally have "Don't Panic" inked on my arm, so I may just be inclined not to panic...)

I work for one of the largest companies on the planet doing work with a budget in the millions (meaning I am a nobody, but also not "nobody") and I don't touch AI personally. There is a group of very rich people who want to get much richer and see humanity as the thing hindering that dream who keep telling us that "if we don't train their new pet how to replace us, we'll be replaced" but I'm going to go ahead and say that AI is a thing, and probably relevant, but like in the way crypto is, not in the way the internet is. Does that make sense?

It's a scam for oligarchs. I'm saying AI is a scam for oligarchs and has very limited use cases and we're already starting to bump up against edges. Also a lot of people REALLY hate it, and that headwind didn't exist for things like "the internet" (you just had a large percentage of the population who initially didn't care, this is active animosity).