Comment by Windchaser

Early steam engines did not produce large amounts of power on demand, though. They produced small amounts of power, were a hassle to fuel and maintain, and broke often. It was reasonable that the engineers of the 1700s said "well, until someone improves on this, it's not worth using"..

.. which is not far off from what people said about ChatGPT in 2022.

I don't know how long it'll take for AI to be as broadly impactful as the steam engine was, but.. it's definitely coming. I expect the world to look radically different in 50 years.