In all seriousness I was thinking about this because of the choice of One Battle After Another to say "16 years later, not much has changed", and they really do not change much. The tech doesn't change, the way people interact with the world doesn't change, and the political environment doesn't change. It doesn't get better and it doesn't get worse.

Which ties into a conversation I had with a friend recently. I said "there's probably worthwhile stuff that will be easier and less divisive to extract once the AI bubble pops."

My friend said "lots of friends are waiting for the AI bubble to pop. It probably won't pop. It will just move on to the next grift. The world won't get apocalyptic completely, but it will continue to go sideways in hard to predict and terrible ways, and while some good things will happen also, the grifts will continue."