Post
AI may be the ultimate tech bubble with a perfect storm of rampant speculation, novice investors, and grand narratives about superintelligence, all while key players lack any clear business model.
It's the Platonic ideal of market mania, where uncertainty only keeps growing, and everyone's betting billions on a story that has no grounding in reality. History suggests such euphoria rarely ends well.
@yogthos my intrusive fear is that it won't be allowed to burst because it's too much of the economy, too pure a distillation of the ideology. like, it will all slowly collapse, and all the markets will contract and recess but we will just have to pretend.
we will end up rewriting history, and doing nuclear priesthood for vc funding sam altman’s version of john murray speer’s god machine.
@thegarbagebird there are physical constraints that ensure the bubble will burst https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/16/post-ai-ai/
@yogthos absolutely. like, i know it objectively, sam altman doesn't have enough compute or power to deliver the things he promised last time. microsoft is not going to build him his own nuclear reactor, no matter how often he asks. the blackwell chip still sets itself on fire due to the limits of the materials it is made of.
i just worry that it doesn't matter, they are going to effortlessly transition to quantum or whatever the next hyperscaler hopium is, the economy is going to crater but we are all going to have to pretend that it isn't happening. we will have to walk around saying that ai was a success in order to preserve the self-mythology of vapour-huffers like prabhakar raghavan and, and, like, peter theil or whoever, so they don't order their unwashed, barefoot partyboy palmer luckey to drone-strike several blocks of public housing.
@thegarbagebird I don't see anything fundamentally different about AI bubble from previous tech bubbles to be honest. There's always been a huge incentive to keep the grift going because so many people ended up being invested in it. They pop every single time. There's nothing unique about the current situation.
If anything, I expect the bubble might just push the US into revolutionary conditions.
@yogthos you are right, i think i have just been paying more attention to this one, so it seems much sillier and more obvious to me.
as for that last part, hell fucking yeah, with heightened and blatant contradiction comes cooler and more dramatic consequences.
@yogthos the manner in which the US government put not just its credibility but virtually all available resources on the line to back these ventures blindly and without any strategy should put to bed any notion that these actors are motivated by anything other than financial blackmail and some vague fear of being 'surpassed' by China. They're now going to destroy their entire living ecosystem, along with all sense of shared prosperity, building data centers across the historical bread basket.
@Shebeencounter I wrote about the underlying drivers recently https://dialecticaldispatches.substack.com/p/the-ai-race-isnt-about-chips-its
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