We tend to overestimate the effect of technology in the short term and underestimate it in the long term. 3D printers may radically transform all manufacturing

We tend to overestimate the effect of technology in the short term and underestimate it in the long term. 3D printers may radically transform all manufacturing eventually but it will take many iterations to get there. Right now it would theoretically be possible to 3D print quite a lot of what we make but traditional manufacturing methods are still cheaper and work fine, so there's no forcing function. If we tried to do something like build a self-sufficient settlement in space, that would be a place where you'd see 3D printing taken a lot further. You would not have large amounts of human labor or big supply chains, so you'd need portable self-contained versatile manufacturing. LLMs are not going to replace human writers, programmers, etc. any time soon for anything but the most menial work. They will augment them. For programming they're basically a smarter more versatile version of autocomplete. I've also found them useful to look up concepts, do research, and summarize and document both code and text. None of those things replace me but they let me get more done a little faster. In the very long term you could see LLMs becoming powerful enough to actually synthesize whole applications outside of contrived examples, but like 3D printing replacing all manufacturing it will take many iterations and may require a forcing function.