Is AI taking over the world? Of investment?

At the extremes of opinions, some folks assert that AI will take over the world and kill off all of humanity in or about 3 years from now (2030), while at the other extreme that it will collapse under its own weight in a similar time frame, leaving the residuals of the bubble in the form of some interesting and useful applications.

Naturally, you hear about the end of humanity in the media because, as the saying goes: "If it bleeds it leads", and mass extinction of the human race is more interesting than another bubble bursting and leaving some beneficial residuals.

I am somewhere in the middle, leaning toward the bubble theory. Maybe that's because I have spent a lot of time in the related fields over decades. But then I am an old guy, and as such, may not understand the new way of thinking. I think the old fashioned way - with my brain.

I am convinced that natural stupidity can easily kill of most of the human population in that same time frame, but probably not all of us. But as the old saying goes, "To err is human, to really foul things up it takes a computer."

The world? Maybe

On the other hand, Generative AI (GAI) is being used for influence operations to greater effect than it ever has been, and as a way to take over the world, even The Brain (from the great cartoon series "Pinky and The Brain") would admire the extent to which much of modern society has fallen pray to computer augmented disinformation. Our focus of attention has been increasingly dominated by the content AI can produce because it is faster at putting together language into coherent word sequences, and its abilities in this regard exceed even those of the greatest human BS artists.

I think that very soon, GAIs will outdo most of the online fraudsters, and that day may even have come already. In person frauds, that's another thing, but exceeding human capabilities at online frauds with personally adaptive responses is now just about more cost effective and efficient than trying to train humans at it. I suspect that politicians will be increasingly training with AI engines (if they are not already) just like chess players now train with computers as their opponents.

But I don't think so

When it comes to BS, computers certainly have humans beat for now. And perhaps that's why they are so admired by so many people whose lives are dominated by making excuses or justifying positions on issues when the real underlying basis for their views are completely different from their public personae portray.

So realistically, for normal understanding, about 10,000 words is what most folks actually know and use.

According to this article, "the average child in a professional family hears 2,153 words per waking hour, the average child in a working-class family hears 1,251 words per hour, and an average child in a welfare family only 616 words per hour. ... by age 3 children in welfare families had a vocabulary of 525 words where children in upper-SES families had vocabulary of 1,116 words." Various other studies have since come up with various other answers, but here's that thing...

When I say under-served (by information technology), I mean, for example, the very significant portion of the population that; works as maids, construction workers, small business sales people, factory workers, farm workers, truckers, and so many other folks who; do not have or use computers at work to speak of; do not program computers, use spreadsheets, or cruise the Web in their spare time; use a public library to get to and read books; go to movies, shop in grocery stores and malls, drive non-computer operated cars, and generally live their lives free from computer technology almost all of the time.

Now imagine you are one of these people faced with generative AI communicating using almost entirely words and word sequences produced by professional writers, scientists, engineers, business people, people with college degrees, and so forth; augmented by people with access to social media using phrases that are only used in computers [LoL :)]; and consider how you would be able to understand anything that the GAIs might produce.

A test. I asked a GAI system a simple question: (my comments/query in italics)

Once you have an email address, you can send messages to your grandchildren if you know their email addresses. what is an email address exactly? I don;t know anything about computers...

May I ask you one question?

Are you using an iPhone, an Android phone, or a computer? None of those - I have a princess phone.

Tell me which one, and I'll walk you through it one easy step at a time. ❤️ What number do I call to send email?

It seems so simple for me, but then I think about my 90-year-old mother-in-law who is relatively well read, has a smart phone, and will be unable to follow these directions. And if you think my comments are snarky, you are wrong. I have done customer service and had exactly these sorts of questions. And other customer service folks have had the same experiences.

The problem is simple. The GAIs have no actual model content involving people who have not been engaged in computer usage. So their entire corpus of sequences of tokens lacks the part of the space required to deal with this population. More of this dialog at the end of the article...

The GAIs talk down to normal people (and everyone else), they repeat themselves, treat people like they are idiots, are disrespectful, and my experience with people not used to the frustration of dealing with computers is that they will not tolerate it for long.

Investment? Teetering on the edge

I think investors writ large see the massive valuations as an opportunity to invest in a field where valuations are growing very quickly and, for the most part, they are jumping in to ride the wave. But I also think the wave will break soon as the promises start to be broken. It's not that the current GAIs are doing badly. In fact they are doing a lot of amazing things we could not do before with computers. But that is not the same as replacing all human thought with automation. Investors are being presented with demonstrations, as they always are, that are stunning and astonishing, but the astonishment is starting to wear off, and as is does, the shock and awe will become expectations unfulfilled.

The last time this happened

This is not new. It happens every decade or so. COVID exploded the value of companies using mRNA technology and generally other related fields of biological and medical advancements. But that is slowing down for now as the appetite has moved on. It also made enormous gains for online meetings, delivery services, touchless payment systems, N95 masks, cleaning supplies, and so forth. But that has settled down.

The Internet boom in the late 1990s held explosive growth for anything that said Web, and the smart phone market exploded after the iPhone was introduce, and Cloud computing was a huge boom. And this will keep happening as innovation continues to bring new things to a public enchanted with the real advantages these things bring. The same is true for the GAIs. Until it is not.

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In summary

AI is amazing, but it only learns from the sources it has, and those sources really represent less than 10% of humanity, and only the folks who are already overrepresented. And it is obnoxious, overbearing, repetitive, and opinionated in the extreme. It jumps to bad conclusions and sustains them till corrected, and then is patronizing and even more obnoxious. It is not likely taking over the world, and investors will adapt before long and start to dump the things that were pumped. Go for the next trend before it's too late... Get well grounded in the amazing new innovations in shoelaces.

Copyright(c) Fred Cohen, 2026 - All Rights Reserved

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