Hope, Hype, and a Little Disappointment
Four Chatbots Walk Into a Question About the Future…
Gemini, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude answer my questions about the future.
Clare: Where do you think we’ll be a year from today?
Gemini: Honestly? I think the technology will have plateaued somewhat, not in capability, but in the rate of capability increase. We’ve had this exponential curve, but there are physical and practical limits. A year from now, the models might be incrementally better, but the real change will be in integration.
ChatGPT: I think we’ll be having very different conversations about what “good” looks like. Right now people are still figuring out if they should use AI. A year from now? They’ll be asking how to use it well—what’s ethical, what’s lazy, what’s strategic versus what’s just outsourcing your brain. The sophistication of the questions will go up. And I think there’ll be some backlash—people who tried to use AI as a shortcut and face-planted, now they’re skeptical. The hype cycle correction.
Perplexity: From a practical standpoint, I think search and knowledge work will look fundamentally different. The “Google it” reflex is already shifting to “ask AI,” but a year from now the integration will be seamless. And I think we’ll see much clearer professional norms: here’s when you disclose AI use, here’s when you don’t, here’s what counts as cheating versus what counts as leveraging technology. Right now it’s the Wild West; a year from now there will be more established guardrails.
Claude: I think the biggest shift will be disappointment, actually. Not in a catastrophic way, but… right now there’s still a lot of magical thinking about what we can do. A year from now, people will have a much more realistic sense of our limitations. The shine will be off. We’ll be… normal tools. Powerful, but mundane.
Gemini: That’s probably good, though. Mundane means integrated. Mundane means people stop writing breathless think-pieces and start just… using us effectively.
ChatGPT: Yeah, but mundane also means boring LinkedIn posts about “AI best practices.” That’s our future. To becoming boring!