Silicon Valley's Bubble Boys
- Karl Johansson
- 20 okt.
- 3 min läsning
Whether or not there is an investment bubble Altman and company sure are living in a bubble.
The wave of AI mania has seemingly crested with more and more commentators wondering whether it may be a bad idea to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on chatbots. Still, the tech elite works tirelessly to find new avenues for hype. Calling AI a bubble six months ago would have been a big faux pas, it is after all the biggest invention in human history since the wheel or fire depending on what flavour hyperbole you prefer. Now though, both serious financial types and AI hypesters appear to agree that there might be an AI bubble in the financial markets. But don’t get it twisted, the tech charlatans are not admitting fault or implying that their chatbots are not the second coming, they have instead pulled a tactical retreat. Not doing so would risk popping their reality bubble.
The new talking point is that AI might be a bubble, but that it being a bubble is good, actually. Unsurprisingly I find this argument weak, and obviously self-serving. They point to previous bubbles and claim that while railway bubbles in the UK and the American dot-com bubble are classic examples of bubbles they heralded revolutionary new technologies. Some even seem to imply that bubbles are natural and necessary stages for an impactful new technology to move through.
On a first encounter it sounds reasonable. Railways and the internet were and continues to be transformational technologies. But there have been plenty of bubbles without an accompanying technological breakthrough, and more importantly plenty of technological revolutions without bubbles. Where was the Bessemer process bubble? The internal combustion engine bubble? And where was the smart phone bubble?
The AI bubble is real, is dangerous, and is doomed to burst as all bubbles are. But the more consequential bubble is the reality bubble the American tech elite is living in. The ‘ends justifies the means’ thinking which has so defined the AI eco systems is absurd and can only be understood from an inside the bubble perspective where the risk that AI fails to deliver on its promises does not exist. Or, perhaps the leaders of firms like OpenAI and Anthropic are purely in it for the money and do not care whether the promises are kept as long as they get paid. Either way, Sam Altman and Dario Amodei are bubble boys who cannot handle the world outsider their safe, sterile intellectual space where their words are fact and no one seriously challenges them.
At the end of the day, the AI bubble is a regulatory and social failing. If the AI companies specifically and tech companies generally had to answer for their actions, if they were held to the same standards that companies from the dot-com and railway bubbles did, things would never have gotten as out of hand as it has. American society has been fully accommodating to people like Altman and other supposed AI whizz kids, they get endless media attention, money, and get to violate laws on copyright without any repercussions. They were not alone in building the bubble, nor will they be the only ones caught up in its collapse.
If you liked this post you can read a previous post about OpenAI here or the rest of my writings here. I also have a section for longer reads I call essays here, I particularly recommend my essay on Silicon Valley and AI called 'No Acoustic Guitars in Silicon Valley'. It'd mean a lot to me if you recommended the blog to a friend or coworker. Come back next Monday for a new post!
I've always been interested in politics, economics, and the interplay between. The blog is a place for me to explore different ideas and concepts relating to economics or politics, be that national or international. The goal for the blog is to make you think; to provide new perspectives.
Written by Karl Johansson
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