A friend recently recommended Craig McCaskill’s article “The Bubble That Knows It’s a Bubble” with a disclaimer “it’s quite a read”. After forgetting it and coming back to it later I can say: it’s so worth reading it!
I admit that I thought it was some “AI hate” article, but in fact it isn’t. Craig shows how and why bubbles grow (starting in 1840 with the British Railway Bubble!) and how they burst.
It’s not the first article I read in that regard, but the topic that Craig’s post makes unique is that he goes a step beyond the burst. And this is what I found interesting! Even if a bubble burst in the past, something valuable remained. Be it the physical railroads after 1847 or the fibre optics cables, data centers including the computer hardware after the DotCom in 2004. And in the case of AI, the models won’t vanish.
Yet the one paragraph is rather … depressing:
[…] we could see the first bubble that eliminates more employment during its rise than its fall.
followed by
The AI bubble might give us unprecedented productivity and fewer jobs. That’s a social equation we haven’t solved.
Just today I read the article in t3n, referencing Zoom’s CEO agrees with Bill Gates, Jensen Huang, and Jamie Dimon: A 3-day workweek is coming soon thanks to AI. Well that sounds awesome, but — really? These large companies did not become big through charity.
If everyone is gaining the efficiencies, it’s not an advantage anymore and you have to cut costs … I don’t see a 3-day workweek, I see 40% layoffs.
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