Can anyone here argue with confidence (read: evidence) that this AI boom is, in fact, yielding real-life, non-superfluous evolutionary advantages to mankind in general? Judging from a primitive metric, I see no one around me benefiting from AI, nor the people closest to them. Considering the current scale and volume of investments in the field, I would expect that finding AI success stories from a random sample within metropolitan communities should be common by now. That seems not to be the case from my point of view. How can anyone argue that investing in AI indeed yields superior results over merely distributing all the resources diversely, when we have much stronger evidence of advantageous outcomes for other domains? I understand this looks like a false duality, but it may not be considering the established, narrow, and concentrated investment structures. Overall, software has a really flimsy connection to actual human necessities, being more of a vector than a need in itself. But AI seems to be all about itself for now. Recall, at least, that AI winters are about a steep decay in public confidence over the promised outcomes, rather than necessarily a decline in research progress and investments. So the more the investment rates outpace the actual outcomes, the higher the probability of it happening. Ironically, I revised this text with GPT, but this is as far as it’s been useful to me. It’s just marginally more useful than what we actually have, and substantially more expensive.