I'd agree that "the current state of AI" will be assistants, abeit powerful ones.
With that being said, we've seen incredible increases in the ability of AI, even in the last 5 years. We're approaching human-level ability in NLP quite fast - and will surpass it soon. I (personally) don't believe that the past 23 years will be a great indicator for the next 23 in terms of AI. Some of the driving forces in the past 10/15 years are: hardware (we started using GPUs), Transformers, and massive - and I mean massive - increases in training data, fueling a nonlinear progression.
Why do you say we will surpass human level abilities in NLP soon? Humans that literally use diapers can process quite complex language abs consumer far less watts of power than AI to date and do not requiring consuming an Internet amount of data to do it. Human “training” consists largely of hearing a tiny amount of other humans engage a very limited amount of conversations and nursery rhymes / songs. I’m not sure how this displays anything like human level ability.
Anecdotally, I (and others I know) often break out of procrastinating because of a perceived threat (eg. lower grades, reduced social status). This negative reinforcement can be represented in the equation as value = "lack of punishment", however I'm curious if there's more to it than that.
With that being said, we've seen incredible increases in the ability of AI, even in the last 5 years. We're approaching human-level ability in NLP quite fast - and will surpass it soon. I (personally) don't believe that the past 23 years will be a great indicator for the next 23 in terms of AI. Some of the driving forces in the past 10/15 years are: hardware (we started using GPUs), Transformers, and massive - and I mean massive - increases in training data, fueling a nonlinear progression.