There’s a conversation I seem to keep having lately, where someone who doesn’t like AI is telling me about how it is a bubble, no one will ever pay enough money for it to ever earn back all the investment etc. It often comes with some fun examples of AI fails or silly things someone like Sam Altman has said.
I can’t be sure what’s in the mind of these people or the pundits online like Zitron who love to push these kinds of narratives, but it feels like at least part of it comes from some kind of hope that if it is really a bubble and if that $1T of circular financing ever gets understood as the scam it really is then maybe we can avoid a future dominated by AI and horrible human beings who run these AI companies.
I think my problem in these conversations is that I agree with a lot of what the other person is saying. I also would like to see Zuck forced to live out the rest of his pathetic life in a Rohingya refugee camp (after we offer them to live in his place in Hawaii). I wish we’d stop interviewing AI CEOs to ask them about what the future will be and pretend that thier lies about Super-intelligence or Universal Income are any different than their lies about privacy. I wish this whole thing would move a lot slower because as a culture we are still trying to recover from the effects of television, much less social media, and I can’t even think about how much worse AI will make things. That’s even if we don’t consider things like climate impact etc.
I would like to believe these tools really aren’t good for anything and will fail but it’s not true.
Maybe there is a bubble that will pop soon. Maybe Coreweave‘s investors are going to end up losing a lot of money, but we can’t really know when that will happen or how big the blast radius will be. Unlike in the DotCom bust most of the public AI companies are posting huge profits so there will be survivors and the ideas and technologies will not vanish in any case. This wave of transformation is coming and its affects on the labor market, and the market place for ideas are coming faster than many people can handle.
No one is going to save us from it. The government is doing its best to make sure it doesn’t help us. Wishing that something about the economics will cause this to fail isn’t going to work either. Even if super intelligence is simply not possible and even AGI is way way harder than we think, these tools are working now and they are adding value now and we have barely begun to learn how to use them. Even though the costs are high, the cost for any specific level of AI capability is going to fall.
Having worked at both Amazon and Google, I have worked with extremely sharp software developers who built amazing systems. Some of them will say that AI can’t do what they do. I think they are likely correct but having also done a lot of consulting with less fancy companies I can tell you that more than 90% of software is way less interesting and boilerplate. Claude can do almost all of this this stuff just fine.
It is not at all surprising that we are seeing a lot of success with AI and coding tools. Coding tools are what the coders who build things know about. Over time we will find more and more applications. Adoption in Healthcare and other industries with lots of paperwork and labor cost is growing fast.
Maybe we aren’t close to replacing all the workers with remote operated Optimus bots. Maybe AI isn’t going to be 70% of the economy or whatever. But if you think the usage will never pay for the power to run the new data centers, then I think you should think more about how much surveillance is coming to watch over the remaining workers and how that will keep the GPUs humming.
My personal view on AI doom is less about how it’s going to become intelligent and destroy us, but that people with power are going to use it to gain more power and control over the rest of us. It’s an easy prediction to make since it happens every day.
We can try to educate people more about the abilities and pitfalls of the technology.
We can try to pass laws or regulations which will limit the worst outcomes.
We can try to live our lives as separated from it as possible.
We should do those things, but none of that will stop what’s coming.
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