Steelman · slot A
The forty-year view from inside the lab
A senior AI researcher who has lived through prior hype cycles would argue —I've been doing this for forty years, and I've watched my own field repeatedly convince itself human-level intelligence was just around the corner. It wasn't, and it isn't now. Today's models are powerful tools, but they still can't reason in any robust sense — that's precisely why I'm building new architectures to address what current systems can't do. The claim that this revolution is categorically different from electricity or the internet doesn't survive contact with the history of productivity gains, which take roughly fifteen years to materialize. New tools displace some jobs and create others; that pattern is going to hold here too. Telling kids to skip college and brace for extinction is making a generational bet on a forecast the underlying science does not support.