What if AI is not accelerating us but keeping us exactly where we are

I have been thinking about this for three months now. Not constantly but enough that it started affecting how I work. How I open my editor. How I reach for AI or decide not to. The question is simple but the answer scares me. Is artificial intelligence helping us build the future or is it just making us extremely efficient at staying in the present? Let me explain with something that happened last week. I needed to implement a file upload feature with drag and drop support. Nothing complicated.