They would have been right, just as the person you're replying to will be. There was not the compute equivalent of ENIAC in every person's office by 1950. The real estate requirements would have been enormous.

Did every office wind up with more compute than an ENIAC? Yes. Did it take as much real estate as ENIACs would have? Of course not.

Did it happen in five years? Absolutely not.

Our AI models will get better and more efficient. Our compute will get more efficient. But how much has FLOPs per watt improved in the last five years? Not much. How much more power efficient have models gotten? Not much, we haven't been optimizing for that, since quality isn't even there yet for many tasks; we've instead been making models larger and require even more compute. It's not hard to extrapolate these trends and see that if you were to replace a billion jobs in five years, enormous amounts of power will be required.

Those people are still gonna exist though, right…. Right…?

The people still consume (basically) the same amount of electricity though, regardless of their employment status.

Edit: though perhaps you're making the point that the AI energy usage is a drop in the bucket compared to its overall usefulness. I agree on that.

I also hope there are anti-capitalism effects with AI. We won't need 10,000 different ad agencies when we have well-running space communism.