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.
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.