[digging]

My gut reaction to that commentary is that it's a misinterpretation of the time scales people are estimating.

If I say, "LLMs will soon reinvent what it means to do knowledge work," and that doesn't happen within 5 years, does it mean I overestimated the short term impact? Or does it mean that "soon" was relative?

Ultimately though, the long-term effects are impossible to estimate well. The effects of new technologies build upon each other. The first person to take a shovel to a walking path and maintain it as a flat surface certainly couldn't have imagined their ancestors would be crushed to death by two-ton SUVs on a paved road that replaced the walking path.