>just extrapolate exponentially bro
There's a funny psychological phenomenon whereby when the rate of progress in a field has already peaked, people experience maximum enthusiasm and hope for future progress. It's like being in 1969 and expecting that by 1990 we'd take vacations on the Moon and travel from New York to Tokyo in 45 minutes, when in reality the plateau was already reached and people in 1990 were still travelling in Boeing 747s.

We're there right now with AI, this is it, the top AI Clippy of 2040 might not be dramatically better than ChatGPT 4.1, it could even be made much worse out of greed, just like air travel also became worse starting in the 1970s.