It’s in the title. I’ve been waiting and hoping for some counterexamples, but I’ve concluded, and I think people need to be ready for the eventuality that the AI bubble is NOT going to burst.
That’s a bold claim, but I’m prepared to back it up.
- Not adopting the AI paradigm is going to become increasingly costly
First of all, it’s not going to not burst because AI is good or useful. In fact, right now, we see lots of companies pushing away from AI because it is unreliable and problematic.
But the alternative costs from the other side are creeping up. If you are a company looking to hire developers to write software, you need to provide development machines to those developers. A development machine that might have cost $2000 a couple years ago is well on the way to $6000-$7000 in the near future.
And that’s small potatoes. Even if you buy those for your developers, who are still highly paid, mind you, the software they’re going to be writing will NOT be for PCs - regular people are NOT going to spend that for a PC. Which means most of the software that’s going to be developed will target iOS and Android… and that’s it. Which will continue to put 30% of all development profits RIGHT back into the locked down AI nightmare ecosystem. It’s a disgusting, negative feedback loop that’s about to accelerate in ways that would’ve made the most nightmarish predictions 5 years ago seem conservative. You might not want to swim in the ocean of crap, but they are actively eating the pier under your feet, and using the bodies that hit the water to take it apart even faster. They are going to change the world in ways that will FORCE you into their system - you don’t get a choice.
- Bubbles don’t HAVE to burst anymore
Tesla hasn’t put out a successful new product in 20 years, and it continues to barrel right along, with its useless hack CEO hanging on as the richest person in the world. The old rules do not apply, and the sooner we acknowledge it, the sooner we can prepare for the new normal.
- NOBODY who is responsible for enforcing anything like responsible economic activity will EVER allow the bubble to burst
WHO is going to allow the bubble to burst? The investors who would lose everything? The SEC that would collapse the entire economy by not turning a blind eye? The captured politicians that are being paid billions to be complicit?
Let’s be clear… the invisible hand of the market, to the extent it ever existed, certainly does not now. The idea the market is fair and responds properly to economic activity requires all actors to act, if not in good faith, at least SELF-INTERESTEDLY against each other as checks and balances on each other to verify the veracity of real claims about the economy. Is ANYBODY deluded enough to think that’s happening? Everyone who could potentially blow the whistle or pop the bubble knows each other and they all have guns pointed at each other’s heads knowing they all go down together. It will NOT be allowed to pop, and if that means making up numbers out of whole cloth, it’s going to happen. If people won’t rise up when their pedophile president is murdering people in the streets, they’re certainly not going to when OpenAI claims 1 trillion in profit out of nowhere. Add to the fact that small investors who MIGHT get skittish are SUCH a small and irrelevant piece of the pie in these economic transactions that even if they all pulled out, the machine could not be stopped, and you realize that there is no stopping this nightmare.
It’s not going to pop. Barring a revolution, we are on an inexorable course to the most awful tech dystopia imaginable. And even revolution is unlikely to be enough. Most people are so addicted to corporate tech that they’re more likely to link arms and defend the headquarters of their favorite social media than take up arms against it. Make no mistake… the end of consumer facing open hardware is not a temporary redirection of resources to a failing bubble - it is a complete shift in the entire paradigm of how people use technology, bringing it under the complete control of a very few. This is not the latest salvo in an ongoing battle - it is the final bomb that has ended the war, and there’s nothing left but slow attrition until personal computing and the very concept of devices you own and control sit in the dustbin of history with cars you could work on yourself.
I want nothing more than to be wrong. I am not happy to doomsay here. But to pretend this is some kind of blip in a machine that’s going to stabilize someday is to ignore every single bit of functioning pattern recognition I have.
I don’t have a good conclusion. I guess - hug your families, hoard what tech you can, and maybe make offgrid plans now. Good luck to all of us.
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I think there will be a time when it costs too much to keep a data center safe and operational.
I went to a town meeting where someone is pushing to get one of these data centers built. People are not happy about this. Nobody supports it. And when it gets built anyway, there will be a bunch of people who suddenly can’t afford their electric or water bills, and there’s a very definite and universally hated reason why those bills are suddenly so high. That reason has a physical location and an address, along with a lot of vulnerable infrastructure.
I went to that meeting expecting to be the only person against the data center. I was wrong. People are mad.
There is also this.
Tl;dw is that these data centers produce a ton of inaudible low frequency infrasound (think that feeling in your chest from a subwoofer) which can have health effects, especially with prolonged exposure.
Basically this guy recorded sound and infrasound and tested the neighborhoods around data centers vs. West Texas where all of the oil drilling and fracking activity is vs. normal places. The data centers were producing massive amounts of infrasound 24/7 and neighbors were really pissed. Multiple reports of health concerns from it. It was more than the areas of drilling and fracking in TX.
One of my favorite moments of the video is when he is at someone’s home near the data center and discussing the situation and he lays the camera down on the floor and the video feed begins to visibly vibrate.
Oh what fun, so the whole thing vibrates too.
I disagree. This is so much like the dot com era. I mean much like dotcom the web did not disapear and ai won’t disapear when ai busts. Bust just means recognition of the lack of return and a massive crash in the stocks.
The internet bubble was not about internet never being successful. It was a financial investment bubble based on overinvestment/inflated share values far beyond the profit extraction power of those companies. Pets.com is a posterchild of business model absurdity. Worldcom and CISCO also crashed due to absurd hype overinvestment levels. The housing/GFC bubble was not the end of housing or banking.
There is a similar bubble in AI investment, where LLM models have zero competitive moat, and cannot ever make money, where datacenter competition is rising faster than demand, and also cannot make money based on economic value, because of competitive pressure.
The only hope for AI surviving a financial bubble is the US government buying all the excess datacenter compute for surveillance and military skynet. This is extremely likely if only to ensure Zionist supremacist rule over the US, but also because the US is desperate to pick one last sector of competition with China, before losing at everything. Zionist supremacist rule over America political establishment unanimity, is matched by warmongering supremacy ambitions against China led multipolarism/global south.
The only alternative to an AI bubble, is an everything else collapse, and US bankruptcy Skynet led genocide of Americans for US establishment supremacy objectives instead of “machine supremacy”. There can never be any threat to Zionist/warmongering supremacism in America, and you will all die before any shift to humanism/freedom dividends/UBI occurs.
So there was this Roman empire…
“This bubble won’t burst like the last 100 times because “X” is different.”
This was clearly written by an AI chatbot and is complete bullshit.
- Bubbles don’t HAVE to burst anymore Tesla hasn’t put out a successful new product in 20 years, and it continues to barrel right along, with its useless hack CEO hanging on as the richest person in the world. The old rules do not apply, and the sooner we acknowledge it, the sooner we can prepare for the new normal.
But it sells a useful product?? It sells an electric car and sells the only one that governments seem to be aware exists, since all the charging infrastructure is for Teslas.
I think a lot of the reasons you have pointed out are why the bubble hasn’t burst and won’t soon. It took 9 years after the dismantling of the Glass Steagall act for the Great Recession. The economy just has a lot more momentum than people think it does. The people near the top do not have enough power and control over the economy to stop everything forever though.
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I agree that company fundamentals don’t matter, and that the goal right now seems to be techno-feudalism.
Retail is ~40% of the stock market, and retirement is ~20%. I think it will pop whenever the next recession starts. If enough people lose their jobs, and start selling their stocks and dipping into their retirement to pay bills, these stocks will tank. It’s my theory that these stocks are held up by all the people passively investing in index funds following the SP500 and NASDAQ. During any small sell-off by active investors, a lot of people’s retirement plans will eventually automatically just buy and slowly bring it back up.
A scare, widely reported by media, could also cause people to take enough notice where a lot of people manually adjust their plans. But, yeah, the media is pretty captured now, and will avoid reporting on stuff that could cause scares.
Nah. Personal devices use might reduce in capitalist dystopias - and that’s is mostly US. But they would never allow that in functional countries like China and EU countries. No way.
China will produce personal devices even when others won’t. I trust in china
Tell me you’re not an economist without telling me you’re not an economist.
Barring a revolution, we are on an inexorable course to the most awful tech dystopia imaginable.
Sounds like a call to action…
Its good for an unpopular opinion.
Counter point: a boat got turned a bit sideways in a canal and the entire financial system almost came crashing down and there were no bunnies for Easter.
My point is that very small, unknown things can cause huge interruptions to global functioning, and almost everything about the current bubble depends on a very stable global order, where specifically, the west, has access to the chips, when the west does not manufacture them in spite of whatever agreements are on paper.
A small shock to the supply chain and it all falls down.
Appreciate both the perspective and the good faith interpretation of my opinion.
Good reply. ❤️ Sorry to highjack here but I see this concept of good faith and bad faith sometimes and I wonder what a bad faith reply would/could look like?
you are simply wrong. you absolute buffoon, you complete dingbat, you utter moron!!!1!1!111!!
Eh. I think bad faith usually means committing logical fallacies on purpose just to win an argument. I.e. you don’t care about the truth or a greater good, you just say anything it takes to “win”. It’s usually more deceptive than name calling.
The dotcom bubble burst. We still use the internet
This is actually a very important way of looking at it, because I think some people are picturing very different ideas of what ‘bursting’ means, and that results in everyone talking past each other.
When the dust settles, a lot of investors will have lost a lot of money, and that will have a big impact on the wider economy. That’s what it means for a bubble to burst, and it absolutely will happen. But I think people who are hoping that a burst will lead to AI going away for good will be sadly disappointed.
That was an entirely different world that functioned under entirely different rules. There were no companies or individuals in the world with a fraction of the total resource capture that just a handful of individuals have right now. A handful of people are essentially buying an ENTIRE vertically integrated worldwide industry. There are no competitors. There can’t BE competitors. If you participate in the economy at ALL, you are in some way keeping the bubble going. There is no way to stop it.
That was an entirely different world that functioned under entirely different rules.
Was it? IIRC at the time, cisco was selling routers to ISP’s it was investing in the same kind of circle jerk thats going on between NVidia, OpenAi, et al.
Hardware provider getting tickled by builder getting tickled by web dev who is getting ticked by the hardware.
I do think you are pointing out a difference, but its not going to last, which is these companies are trying to monopolize commodity hardware. But eventually, the music stops.
SOMEONE gets left holding the bag. Tulips aren’t actually that value. The slop doesn’t work.
(Also wtf you people downvoting for. This a space for unpopular opinions.)
I think OP is too young to remember Nortel.
I remember young people making this same argument during the real estate bubble in 2008.
(Also wtf you people downvoting for. This a space for unpopular opinions.)
Appreciate the defense, but I knew this would be touchy, and if I didn’t expect downvotes I wouldn’t have posted at all. I knew what I was getting into. I cared enough to see if anybody else was as despondent as me looking at things or if I’m an outlier.
