Everybody keeps telling me AI is going to replace scientist…

Everybody keeps telling me AI is going to replace scientists, engineers, programmers, writers, accountants, lawyers, and possibly God Himself by next Thursday.
So I thought I'd give it a fair shot.
Nothing exotic. Nothing crazy.
Just a fairly ordinary analysis problem.
The thing looked at it, coughed politely, shuffled its papers, and informed me that the context required was about thirteen million tokens beyond what it could handle.
Thirteen million.
That's not a limitation. That's a restraining order.
Then it suggested saving pieces of the work to files.
Wonderful.
Except it couldn't meaningfully keep track of the files, couldn't process them as a coherent whole, and couldn't remember enough of the bloody problem to solve it anyway.
It's like hiring a genius consultant with severe goldfish syndrome.
Every five minutes:
"Excellent point. What were we discussing again?"
Maybe one day this stuff gets there.
Maybe one day it reads entire projects, understands decades of accumulated work, follows long chains of reasoning, and does something genuinely revolutionary.
But right now a lot of the marketing sounds like a drunk bloke at the bar explaining how he's definitely going to become heavyweight champion once he gets around to standing up.
The reality is less Skynet and more a very enthusiastic intern who occasionally produces brilliance, occasionally produces nonsense, and frequently requires adult supervision.
Useful?
Absolutely.
Magic?
Not even close.
The future may belong to AI.
The present still belongs to people who can remember page two while reading page three.