Our Collective Bike Shed Moment

Drawing on Parkinson's Law of Triviality (the 'bike shed' effect), the author argues that society — including technologists, researchers, policymakers, and economists — is failing to seriously engage with the transformative implications of LLMs and AI. Instead of debating the 'reactor' (the profound societal changes AI will bring), most people are distracted by trivial concerns or dismissing AI through normalcy bias and the 'Somebody Else's Problem' field. The author contends LLMs already outperform most humans in engineering tasks and are improving rapidly, yet the depth of collective deliberation remains dangerously shallow.