I wonder about the transcendence take as well. I think a lot of us are strapped into this ride regardless. If there’s a fresh new paradigm awaiting, I hope it’s a good one.
But my main observation is mostly personal: I get taken in a lot by technology waves, hoping things will get better, but I haven’t ever crisply defined “better.” Or my criteria has been too loose and I conflate novelty with progress. If advanced models eventually accelerate science and medicine so that more people can lead healthy fulfilling lives, that sounds a lot better. But if a model helps me use an undocumented API of a random IoT device tomorrow, I don’t think anything is much better, and I didn’t even get much out of the process. When efficiency isn’t paramount, I’m often not clear on when to take the shortcut versus when to do the work.