How to burst the AI bubble: Strike at its roots

cedws

The “reverse centaur” is a natural product of capitalism wanting workers to be as replaceable as possible in order to drive down wages. An ordinary “centaur” is counter to companies’ goals, they don’t want workers empowered.

dude250711

Bubbles do not have roots.

cryo32

Just wait for the economics to catch up and eat the marketing. No effort required.

pydry

The bubble is weirdly being kept alive by the promise it can replace software developers, which is ironic because all it has really achieved is a deluge of slop. Social media has also gone utterly crazy. The last time I saw a gaslighting operation on this scale and volume (including accounts who "hate" AI "because its so scary good") was during the start of the Gaza war. These accounts becoming easier to distinguish too, because whether they boost AI or feign criticism they all categorically refuse to use the s word. I guess there is a few trillion riding on perpetuating this mass psychosis so it makes sense they'd try to use every trick to keep it going as long as possible. Internet bubble was nothing like this. The scale is greater, the promises are more insane and the pop is going to be much more devastating.

vkou

> “The bubble doesn’t want cheap useful things,” Doctorow said. “It wants expensive ‘disruptive’ things That about sums it up. I challenge anyone to name five things that have gotten cheaper or better in their life thanks to AI. I can't think of anything that I consume that has gotten better, and the only thing that has gotten cheaper is the value of your skills to your employer, as it wants you to offload more of your work to a machine they own or rent. But perhaps someone here can find some tangible improvement.

feverzsj

It's kinda too big to fail in US now. If it bursts, US will decline quickly.

gsky

AI spending is all what keeping american economy afloat or else a big recession

alansaber

I've been enjoying the industrial revolution parallels. Have the economics of bespoke products changed? Not really. But is it now easier to get a crude, but functional, approximation of an idea? Yes. The main issue appears to be users conflating B for A (and not realising their AI creation is fundamentally a mess).

spwa4

"If that’s the case, AI will let them wire the toy steering wheel directly into the drivetrain. So you can have an amazing idea as a corporate visionary, and you don’t have to have any ego-shattering confrontations with people who know how to do things, who tell you you’re actually an idiot" Just beautiful.

mattbrewsbytes

Usually when talking about bubbles bursting its about a stock market bubble. P/E ratios now are approaching/passing the P/E ratios during the dot com boom/bust. Another reference point with high P/E ratios was around 1929-1930 (there are others too). The dot com boom can be thought of as ecommerce which enabled investing in a lot of silly ideas at the time. A key technology that underpinned it all and won out was search. Every ecommerce site felt like they needed search, there were search engine companies, lots of competition across google, yahoo, etc. An interesting lens to put on AI and the current stock market is that the software will be commoditized, its an eventuality. Its trending towards being able to run LLMs locally and get decent output. Decent is subjective but output similar to Q4 of 2025 models is when we started seeing more consistently usable output. I believe that will a potential the inflection point for a bubble bursting the stock market: local or DIY LLMs producing "good enough" output and companies publicly backing away from enterprise contracts, lowering their AI spend if they can find cheaper ways to do it.

tim333

Ironically I had a job figuring out what he meant by strike at its roots so I asked an LLM. Gemini seems to think he means labour bargaining/strikes, attacking the stock bubble with better accounting regulations and open source. I'm not sure any of those will make much difference beyond what's already happening?

andrewheins84

Didn’t this man just release enshittification? He’s killing it from north of the border