https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/19/bubblenomics/#pop
"My latest column for
Locus Magazine is "What Kind of Bubble is AI?" All
economic bubbles are hugely destructive, but some of them leave behind wreckage
that can be salvaged for useful purposes, while others leave nothing behind but
ashes:
<
https://locusmag.com/2023/12/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/>
Think about some 21st century bubbles. The dotcom bubble was a terrible
tragedy, one that drained the coffers of pension funds and other institutional
investors and wiped out retail investors who were gulled by Superbowl Ads. But
there was a lot left behind after the dotcoms were wiped out: cheap servers,
office furniture and space, but far more importantly, a generation of young
people who'd been trained as web makers, leaving nontechnical degree programs
to learn HTML, perl and python. This created a whole cohort of technologists
from non-technical backgrounds, a first in technological history. Many of these
people became the vanguard of a more inclusive and humane tech development
movement, and they were able to make interesting and useful services and
products in an environment where raw materials – compute, bandwidth, space and
talent – were available at firesale prices.
Contrast this with the crypto bubble. It, too, destroyed the fortunes of
institutional and individual investors through fraud and Superbowl Ads. It,
too, lured in nontechnical people to learn esoteric disciplines at investor
expense. But apart from a smattering of Rust programmers, the main residue of
crypto is bad digital art and worse Austrian economics.
Or think of Worldcom vs Enron. Both bubbles were built on pure fraud, but
Enron's fraud left nothing behind but a string of suspicious deaths. By
contrast, Worldcom's fraud was a Big Store con that required laying a ton of
fiber that is still in the ground to this day, and is being bought and used at
pennies on the dollar.
AI is definitely a bubble. As I write in the column, if you fly into SFO and
rent a car and drive north to San Francisco or south to Silicon Valley, every
single billboard is advertising an "AI" startup, many of which are not even
using anything that can be remotely characterized as AI. That's amazing,
considering what a meaningless buzzword AI already is.
So which kind of bubble is AI? When it pops, will something useful be left
behind, or will it go away altogether?"
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
