AI’s Real Impact: Capital and Tooling

Frontier AI's most consequential changes so far are the flood of capital into the sector and the normalization of AI tools in software engineering, not the arrival of artificial general intelligence. That shift reorganizes labour (how engineers work), market power (which firms capture developer mindshare), and policy (where regulators and states focus industrial strategy). — If true, policy and public debate should shift from existential AGI alarmism to questions about industrial concentration, labor displacement via tooling, and infrastructure (power, chips, data) dependency.