Many people are making predictions, about AI and Bitcoin, the economy in general, etc.

Often they are insiders and see many things we are yet to see. The predictions are both doom and gloom. And the people are generally smart.

How seriously should we take these predictions?

1.) It is super hard to predict your own outcomes, let alone the industry and second or third order effects. They see the trends and they see what they are working on. The mistake is they often extrapolate, but they can't consider the effects of regime changes (not political regime, but the dynamics of a complex system). There are often critical points where everything changes.

2.) timeframes and probabilities are basically pure noise unless it's something they have ready and know they will be shipping short term. You can ignore it these parts of predictions completely.

3.) what is useful are often rough predictions of dynamics as a function ("when compute doubles, capabilities quadrupole" ... Maybe again up to a point)

4.) another useful thing is predicting possibilities. Possible futures that we can't imagine. While I'm very skeptical about probabilities and exact outcomes, it is good to know the landscape of possible futures. It will almost certainly not be exactly as described and usually many futures will happen at the same time ("some countries devolve into digital dystopias, some will see it as a market opportunity and switch to liberty - either as a whole or special zones"). I'm this way people predicting completely opposite outcomes can be all right at the same time.