I used to be skeptical of AI. It was this nebulous thing that was like magic. It scared people, whether those fears are justified, only time will tell. But from what I see, it feels like it could be a gamechanger for so many people when it comes to various aspects of their lives. But only if they stop being afraid of it and simply learn to harness it’s powers.

When the whole AI hype-train had just started a couple years ago, I didn’t really know what it was. I tried it out and thought that it was pretty cool. It was like a friend you chat with who knew almost everything about every topic you could think of. You could talk to it about sports or history or ask it to do your homework, it was pretty amazing. Then I started using it for programming, mainly for my assignments in college that I couldn’t be bothered to do myself. I realized that AI could be this powerful tool when it came to programming. It was incredible to see it just generate lines and lines of code in seconds, when it would take me hours, if not days to write the same amount of code. Being a CS major, it was honestly a little terrifying because it was doing the thing that I was supposed to be learning to do. And it did it so quickly that it was honestly disheartening for me to even think about.

I don’t think programming was ever something that I was passionate about. I do enjoy problem solving but I never fully applied myself to programming in order to get really good at it, partly because I wasn’t disciplined enough to sit down and suck at it for a long time in order to get better and partly because AI was doing it already (not as well as humans who knew what they were doing, but good enough, at least for the most part if you just wanted to get something done and didn’t care about optimization or security).

So why do I think AI will change lives in the future? After using it for hours and hours for doing programming assignments and other everyday use cases, I came to learn about the limitations of this technology. AI is not some magical technology that can learn and do anything that humans can do. It works by predicting the next token to generate, but doesn’t really understand what it is generating at all. It is trained on a particular set of information and isn’t creative or capable of thinking in the same way humans are, which is a good thing. Because if it could do what a everything a human can do, then they could truly replace us in every sense of the word, but it can’t and that’s why I’m optimistic.

Every time a new technology comes to the forefront, humanity panics like it’s going to be the end of the world and civilization as we know it. I heard this story once about how people reacted to books when they were first introduced. They were worried that people were going to be reading and in their own world, even when spending family time together, that the kids would be buried in their books and not socialize with others.

Technology brings convenience, but that convenience comes at a cost. It’s the same thing with AI. AI is simply the latest of these technologies. It is simply a tool. It is a pretty incredible tool, but a tool nonetheless. As long as people learn to use it for good and have safeguards in place to keep in from causing us harm, like not giving it access to weapons (I’m looking at you US government and OpenAI), I think we’ll be fine. AI has it’s flaws and negative impacts like incredibly high power usage and water consumption that are detrimental to the environment, but those are the costs we’ll have to pay to make our lives even more convenient. I’m not saying we should just accept those negatives but the world is moving more and more towards AI and a few people resisting isn’t going to stop it from being ubiquitous.

I believe agentic models in particular are going to increase productivity and individual’s and business’ earning potential massively in the near future. The barrier to entry for this technology is so low now that anyone who is curious can make almost anything using AI. Anybody can create software or an app that only they need for their purposes, just the way they like it. Anybody can create a website without knowing html/css. Anybody can automate repetitive tasks and save a ton of time to work on something they enjoy. The possibilities are almost endless and I’m really excited for a future where everyone who wants a personal assistant can have one and increase their productivity and output by a factor of 10 if not more.

I remember watching a prediction video about AI from Dr. Mike Isreatel on YouTube about a year ago where he was talking about how AI agents are going to change the game and how a single employee at any given company can basically be managing a group of these AI agents who work on their own tasks/projects and report back. It seemed far fetched at the time but now that I’ve started working with Claude Cowork/Code and have seen what others are able to do with Openclaw, I’m just excited for what the future has in store for us. (For the record I’m not saying AI writes good code, that is production ready, far from it. AI models are pretty bad at writing entire programs from scratch and the code that they do write is filled with bugs and security vulnerabilities. However, what I am saying is that the barrier to entry for programming and building simple programs/apps/automations have never been lower and that’s what I am excited about.)

I don’t think AI is going to take over the world and destroy humanity. AI is currently limited in what it can do well and it will most likely stay that way. At the end of the day, they are just prediction machines that try to generate the next token based on the context they have. These models will and have replaced humans in some fields/roles, and arguably these roles for the most part are roles that involve repetitive tasks like data entry, research, documentation and math/coding heavy roles like programming, analysis, etc.

I feel like AI is the perfect excuse to start a business and reach for the stars because AI is coming for those jobs and if you’re not prepared to embrace it, you will be left behind with no job and no skills in this new AI world. The trades are still safe (for now, until we get competent robots) so you could go there but for a lot of jobs that require you to be solely on computers, those jobs can and will be automated my AI, because newsflash, corporations don’t care about you. If they can replace you for a cheap AI agent that costs a fraction of your salary, they will 100% do it because all they care about is their bottom line. So get ahead and learn how to use AI while it’s still not late, or you’ll be left in the dust wondering what happened to the stable job you were promised.