AI didn't make anyone happy

I am a product engineer in my day job. I get a lot out of AI. Research that used to take half a day is done before lunch. Implementation is faster too. I feel that clearly as a benefit, and I have no intention of denying it.

But being able to make something and that something being worth anything are different. That is the problem.

Things take shape so quickly that they go out before anyone has checked what is inside. It is mass production of junk.

In September 2026, ASODrift pulled the store numbers together. On Appfigures’ tally, new releases in the first quarter of 2026 were up 60% year over year across the App Store and Google Play together. iOS alone was up 80%. April was up 104% combined. The same piece says download growth stayed in the low single digits from 2025 through the first half of 2026.

The people looking have not doubled. Only the apps on the shelf have.

https://asodrift.com/blog/how-many-apps-released-2026

Inflation is accelerating too. GPUs and memory are expensive. Training and inference eat electricity. Data centers use water to cool the machines, and that water goes back into the air carrying heat. I think that heat may be connected to the extreme weather we have been seeing. I do not think this is sustainable, as things stand.

Cyberattacks using AI are getting worse too. Mass leaks of personal data, unauthorized access, takeovers. You name it.

There is also the employment problem. Layoff stories come through every week. On the teams that remain, headcount is down, the calendar is still full, and in some months the margin thins out on the token invoice alone. The cost of getting faster has only moved somewhere else.

After all that, what do you want once productivity is up? The question I wrote in "What lies beyond AI efficiency" comes back. Waiting until you have spare time to face the real thing is too late. The thing you should face was already there, before you got faster.

Humans themselves have not evolved. We only feel as if we have, hidden behind the evolution of devices and technology. Put extremely, if one solar flare hits, the ground under this way of living collapses. Could people whose plain ability to live on their own has fallen behind earlier generations withstand that?

Happiness built on someone else's misfortune always comes back to you, somewhere. Everyone getting to be happy may be an ideal. Still, at this point, I at least have not met anyone AI made happy.