@quinn I'm hopeful (but beware—I'm a pathological optimist) that the AI bubble is inflating *so* fast that it'll burst before too many of the data centres/coal-burning power stations being built for it come on stream. So it'll be hugely wasteful but in the final analysis just a brief blip on the multi-decade climate change graph.
And hopefully the next investment bubble will be in PV panels and grid scale batteries.
@cstross Change will come... "Gradually, then suddenly"
Stein was a very conservative economist, of the American Enterprise Institute sort.
So while his saying is quite the _bon mot_, I'm always queasy about quoting him.
I guess even the other side can have a point, now and again.
@cstross Considering Palantir, they can just write it off as part of the budget for any upcoming wars!
@cstross "Bur think of all the employments it creates!"
@cstross According to this analyst the AI bubble is “17 times bigger than the dot-com bubble and four times bigger than the 2008 real-estate bubble.”
https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/18/business/ai-bubble-analyst-nightcap
According to another article I read the US would be in a recession right now if it wasn’t for AI investment, which is essentially privately-funded stimulus spending at a massive level.
@cstross I am increasingly convinced the AI bubble exists solely to sell the idea of being able to do everything as a means of concentrating money.
The point is to participate in a mammonite magic to have all the of the love of god (that is, all the money) and the thinking involved is as completely detached from any material concern as a stylite.
(The "and everything will be easy!" part is something of a tell, here; that's the language of attaining paradise, not material ambition.)
@cstross All the other stuff—the general obnubilation of factual knowledge, the extirpation of labour, the unbounded consumption—is just the general nature of paradise to the CEO class, existence free of obligation.
@graydon @cstross The AI in the search engine defines "obnubilation" in French and translates it to English as "obsession"; further down the page, Merriam Webster defines it as "mental cloudiness and torpidity" and Collins defines it as "the process or fact of making dimmer, darker, or obscure".
The AI is obnubilating my understanding of "obnubilation".
@cstross
no way "it" can go on forever.
a old stock markets (double) saying my father liked to quote:
the branches of a tree never climb up to heaven; the roots of a tree never reach the center of the earth
`w;7[)
@cstross unsustainable thing don't sustain. It's right there in the word.
This AI nonsense coinciding with the ramp up in climate change impacts is going to be fast, at least by historical standards. Humans these days have a hard time thinking in longer timespans than a few weeks, but we're setting up the destiny and destruction of the next generations.
And how they will hate us.
@quinn I'm hopeful (but beware—I'm a pathological optimist) that the AI bubble is inflating *so* fast that it'll burst before too many of the data centres/coal-burning power stations being built for it come on stream. So it'll be hugely wasteful but in the final analysis just a brief blip on the multi-decade climate change graph.
And hopefully the next investment bubble will be in PV panels and grid scale batteries.
@rysiek @quinn The latest lunatical scam from the techbro grifters is "orbital data centres". Which are simply not practical—vacuum is a thermal insulator and HPC clusters require lots of cooling! (Not to mention the high radiation environment that damages semiconductors and means orbit-qualified kit is typically 10-20 years behind the bleeding edge.)
@rysiek @cstross I was the reporter on it at wired back in the day. I'm not saying it will never happen, but keeping qubits cold enough to power the world's worst calculator is no easy feat. And it's manifestly not a general use computer. It would mostly only be useful for highly specific research tasks, though some of those (especially in physics) would be really cool. The encryption stuff... Unlikely to matter much. It will do it, but not cheap. Bribes and hacking will still work better.
@quinn @rysiek Yup. On the domestic front, if you want to read your citizens' traffic it's easier to pass a law mandating key disclosure then jail any refusniks on general principles. On the foreign front, just establish a national-level firewall like China or Iran or Russia or, oops, the UK and EU seem to be trying to …
@cstross I also share that hope, though it's going to result in absolute misery for so many people, and I suspect an era of madness, especially in my home country.
All of this will end in tears.
@cstross I worry how much their collapse will drag down the rest of the world.
At a time when there are larger clearer tasks for all hands than ever before.
@Photo55 Planetary GNP is on the order of $80-100Tn/year. So this means up to 1.5% of the global economic product will evaporate if the bubble bursts right now. But there's a lot more 2nd-order activity hanging on it, eg. construction, manufacturing. I expect the AI bubble to trigger a full-scale global depression when it pops, not just a US one. 1929 all over again. Or even 1873/1893.
@cstross @Photo55 I've done the math on it. It's actually significantly more than that. Including supply chain impact, it's anywhere from 5-15% of global GDP with a much, much higher percentage in the US.
But that's the small fry shit. Remember 2008? Took less than 10 years to repeat and crank it up orders of magnitude higher with bad loans and new forms of CDOs.
The entire foundation is completely fucked.
@cstross @Photo55 for example, the bubble popping will instantly shock the US and result in doubling unemployment within 5 days due to the stock collapse.
Which will topple consumer debt, which has been showing dangerous cracks for years. Household debt has been continuously climbing. Over 19 TRILLION there.
2008 saw an $11T drop in non-1% wealth, and most of the bailouts saw some money recovered.
There is nothing to recover from ewaste GPUs and brownfield lots.
@cstross @Photo55 and once that bubble pops, it triggers CONTAGION. Which is a big deal. ORCL crashes out, all S&P 100 and 500 go with it because "investor brain" takes over. The 'market' is not rational or fact based, it's 'vibes.'
And the whole house of cards comes down. Every drop escalates unemployment, which escalates defaults, which escalates unemployment, which escalates defaults... it's a self-fulfilling death spiral.
@cstross @Photo55 the system that the 'finance' and 1% class have built has basically made it impossible to stop the avalanche. (Of course the 0.1% believe they'll be able to profit off it and seize more control.)
Contagion, supply chain, and interdependency mean everything feeds back into itself. And the "economy" is already a house of cards. 1933 saw 22% unemployment rise to from 4.8%. But now the exposure is all-encompassing and the Nazis removed the only remaining backstops.
@cstross
I love that first phrase ;)
Much of finance isn't "product" in any meritorious way. People who build could build, etc, and there is plenty to build or fix.
The financial system is between a horde of parasites and a cancer.
A pity. The correction seems to be growing in size and sharpness.
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