[leonroy]

A lot of downers on AI and I can understand it, part of it is the response to things invented when we're older - new music, new movies, new technologies. I guess most of our brains are less plastic as we age and we resist incorporating these new, unfamiliar things in our lives and instead reaffirm the old attributes that make up who we think we are and what we already identify with.

Another aspect I think which makes us down on AI in particular is that it's the first thing which readily seems able to threaten our job security as programmers.

I'd propose a thought experiment where we imagine LLMs and other AI model types don't exist but everything else in computing stays the same (shift to cloud, increasingly asynchronous and interconnected systems). That world actually seems pretty bleak to me. AI upends a lot of industries and yes, it will upend some of our careers. But a world in which it exists seems a lot more interesting than one in which it doesn't.

[smugglerFlynn]

I'd guess there is another factor - with age you understand that promises hyped up around something new are often false.

Instead of solving some deeply rooted problems, people chase shiny and new, while society stays more or less the same.