A Cynics View on AI: Anything to Learn from Past Waves?
Posted: June 24, 2026 Filed under: Personal | Tags: openclaw, technology Leave a commentSomething’s happened to my LinkedIn feed.
Actually, it’s been happening for over two years. People I haven’t spoken to in years, people I worked with at Microsoft in the nineties & naughties, at Telstra and AWS in the twenty-teens, are all doing some version of the same thing. Pivoting into AI consulting. Building AI products. Running AI workshops. Posting about their AI journey. The feed has become one long, earnest, capitalised announcement: this time it’s different, this time it’s real, this time you’d better get on board.
I’ve seen this movie before. A few times.
The PC era. Client/server. The internet boom. Web 2.0. Mobile. Cloud. Each wave arrived with the same energy: this is the thing that changes everything. And here’s the strange part, the part that the cynics always miss: each wave did change things. Significantly. The internet really did reshape how commerce works. Mobile really did put a computer in everyone’s pocket and rearrange attention in ways we still don’t fully understand. Cloud really did collapse the economics of building software. The hype merchants weren’t entirely wrong.
But they were wrong about the shape of the change. They were wrong about the timing. They were wrong about who it would benefit, and when, and how. The gap between “this will change everything” and the moment when your dentist’s receptionist is actually using it is wider than anyone predicted. And the cynics who said “nothing will change” were just as wrong, in the other direction.
So where does that leave the veteran who’s been through four or five of these cycles?
Somewhere uncomfortable, if I’m honest.
There’s a question I keep coming back to. It came up in a thread on SmallBizAI.au that I’ve been thinking about ever since: when your client can do what you do, what are you actually selling? It’s a blunt question. It’s supposed to be. And the reason it keeps sitting with me is that nobody has a satisfying answer yet. The consultants pivoting to AI aren’t answering it. The workshops aren’t answering it. The LinkedIn announcements aren’t answering it, or even asking it.
Because the honest answer is: nobody knows.
I’ve spent most of my career at organisations where the official position on uncertainty was to paper over it with slides. This is strategy. This is the roadmap. This is where we’re going. I got reasonably good at building those slides. And I got pretty good at recognising when the confidence in the room was real versus performed.
The performed confidence around AI is loud right now. The real picture is messier. Genuinely capable things are happening. Some jobs that existed ten years ago don’t anymore, not because the people weren’t good but because the economics shifted. Other jobs got created that nobody was predicting. And we’re somewhere in the middle of a change whose full shape won’t be clear for another decade.
I’m not trying to be the guy who says it’s all hype. It isn’t. I spent part of the last six months building something with an AI agent, and I came away from that with a different sense of what’s possible than I went in with. The stuff works. Some of it works in ways that surprised me.
But I also came away thinking: the optimists who say “everyone will use this and it’ll all be fine” haven’t reckoned with how unevenly distributed the benefits will be. They haven’t sat with the transition costs. They haven’t thought hard about who gets to own the upside.
The thing the hype cycle does is compress time. It makes the distant future feel like it’s next quarter. And because everyone’s trying to get positioned for the future, they’re doing it now, with incomplete information, in a competitive rush that mostly benefits the people selling positioning services. That’s not specific to AI. That’s how every wave has played out.
The veterans who did well in past cycles, the ones I actually admire when I think back, had one thing in common. They stayed curious without panicking. They didn’t check out and wait for things to settle, because things never fully settle. But they also didn’t throw themselves at every new development because the LinkedIn consensus said it was urgent. They kept asking questions that didn’t have comfortable answers. They kept doing the actual work.
I don’t know where AI ends up. Nobody does. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something, possibly a workshop.
The question underneath all the activity is still live, still unanswered. Worth sitting with. When the tool can do the work, what’s the human actually for? That’s not a pessimistic question. It’s a clarifying one. Every wave eventually asks it. The good ones force an honest answer.
I don’t have mine yet. I’m still working on it.
Frank Arrigo has been working in tech for four decades, including 23 years at Microsoft. He’s currently on a career break, building things and asking questions.
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