Since then it's been dominated by advancements in generative AI, which mostly appeals the get-rich-quick types that were also into cryptocurrency speculation. At least generative AI does produce _something_ today, at the cost of tremendous amounts of electricity and pushing humans out of office jobs to food preparation and delivery.
After all this proletarization of knowledge workers is normalized, hopefully the new AI Robber Barons will leave us some sick public libraries or some equivalent, at least.
They won't. One major thing AI does is get you from a question to an answer, like a search engine. But here's the thing: Libraries also do that, and they're good at it (the large ones at least). They do so for free, legally, without using anyone's stuff without consent, without selling your data, and without nearly as big climate concerns. They're a threat to AI (or would be if they weren't already crippled by search engines), and AI doesn't want to keep them around.
After all this proletarization of knowledge workers is normalized, hopefully the new AI Robber Barons will leave us some sick public libraries or some equivalent, at least.