ai bubble

as long as companies keep growing, they make money for their investors on the stock market. but what if a company (google, say) has grown big enough to become a monopoly? there's no more room left for it to grow. it needs new arenas to take over, otherwise it loses value, because it's no longer growing, and a stock whose value isn't rising gets sold. now these ai companies have created a trillion-dollar fantasy, a bubble, with no product behind it, through promises (projections) of buying services or products from one another. they passed the same hundred billion dollars back and forth and made it look like 1.4 trillion. huge stories of productivity and automation (hype) were created. but here's the thing, the value or service created thanks to ai doesn't match the cost of building and running the ai, and closing that gap doesn't look very likely either. when it bursts, most of those trillions will evaporate, and the price will be paid, as always, by ordinary people who lose their savings.

look, nobody here is saying ai is useless; like any technology it definitely has application areas where it's very useful. it's just not a cure-all. for instance, when you say let's make all the trucks in the usa ai-driven and give them their own lane: you'll be putting a million or so drivers, who already work pretty cheap, out of work, and spending billions of dollars on top of that. the result? after all that effort and cost, a better version of what you end up with has existed for two centuries, and it's called a train :) this trillion-dollar bubble is bound to burst, and a third of the us stock market will go up in smoke. the work done and the knowledge accumulated for ai will remain. there'll be an abundance of cheap gpus for running open source ai, and if people like trump and bibi don't start a third world war, life will go on..