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I've lived through a couple major tech changes in my life. Nuclear power was I think the first. It was going to not only put the coal and oil companies out of business but it was going to make electricity too cheap to bother charging for and even allow us to colonize outer space. Didn't quite work out that way. The next was the internet and especially fiber optic cable. Investors gave companies like Cisco huge amounts of money. They used all of it - and even borrowed huge additional amounts - to build and install high-tech routers and lay all the fiber optic cable that was expected to be needed. Everyone was going to have gigabits of bandwidth and again it was goin gto be too cheap to meter. Information would be instantaneous and everyone would know exactly what's going on everywhere at all times. Everyone would understand everyone else and all the troubles caused by politics and religion would disappear. That didn't quite happen either. Cisco's stock only recently recovered to the level that it had before the dot-com bust. Politics is still a cesspit of corruption and ambition. If anything it is worse than before. Now we have AI. Clearly it is disruptive in the short term. Investors are throwing huge amounts of money at AI companies. The companies are spending it all and taking on huge amounts of additional debt to be the first to corner the market on AI. (Stop me if you've heard this story before.) Companies are laying off employees and swapping in AI to take over their jobs. Bureaucratic / clerical errors will be a thing of the past and we'll all have free access to AI robots to do our laundry and wash the dishes. But for now the AI companies are finding that those loans will have to be repaid. The investors want a return on their investment too. (Funny how that all works.) They're switching to charging for tokens instead of taking subscriptions. Tokenization is indeed making more money for the AI companies, but the flip side of that is that it is making things much more expensive for the AI users. So much so that some companies are finding it cheaper to re-hire humans. A lot of the early AI output is crap too. The term "AI slop" is a term that has entered the industry vernacular. I'm still doing my own laundry and washing my own dishes. I think it is still way too early to say how AI will turn out. There's a lot of work that humans don't want to do that can be done cheaply and efficiently by Ai. That should reduce the price of goods and services. We've already seen some of that in previous decades with industrial robots displacing blue-collar factory jobs. AI just kind of takes that to the next level by allowing the automation into the white collar office worker jobs. That sucks if you're the worker that gets displaced, but worldwide demographics being what they are it may work out for the best in the future as populations age out and (skilled) worker shortages become more common. Provided that "AI slop" thing can be worked out and someone can figure out a way to make AI profitable of course. Who knows? If AI isn't a complete scam then maybe we'll even get a cure for cancer out of it when all is said and done.

They also seem to be finding evidence that Social media actually feeds on you like a psychic vampire

I just ate 4 of the muffins in the little bag I didn't realize it and I tried grabbing another one sigh