There's Trump's "Stargate" consortium.[1] Don't want to go there.
We will see more routine use of AI. But it's still not good enough to use where you can't offload the externality costs of errors onto someone else. Customer service being the classic example of where you can.
There are probably two decades of wrenching change ahead as the world adjusts to a weaker US, a stronger Russia, and a much more dominant China. That may slow down civilian tech adoption.
The next big growth area is probably low-cost killbots in high volume.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/22/kelly-evans-what-on-earth-is...
Russia is in its death throes. The invasion of Ukraine was inevitable since it needs to expand outward to remain demographically solvent, which it cannot in the long run even with Ukraine. [0]
[0]https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ec/Ru...
Demographic decline isn’t going to be much of a problem if AI and robotics keep advancing at their current rates, as long as those investments are made (like as China is doing now).
Technology-wise, we seem to be making steps of getting there, a large part of the population seem to be "living" in virtual worlds anyway (through their phones) - and my hunch is that if the world will become progressively nasty due to wars, pandemics, climate change and massive social inequality with no hope of change, there will be growing demand to just to be able to escape all of it and try a better life "somewhere else".
The companion technology might be neuromancer-style "surrogate bodies", where instead of "plugging into" a virtual world, you remote-control a robot in the real world. Want to stay in the real world, but retain the ability to choose whatever body you like? Want to have an insurance against a sudden case of rocket attacks? Want to keep it cool even with 50°C/80% humidity outside? No problem, just transfer your mind to a robot body of your choosing!
To put it another way, cutting people who stopped looking as “not unemployed” is as ridiculous as excluding the price of milk or eggs from real inflation / COL metrics. The fudging of numbers simply cannot last forever.
So while AI will absolutely be a boon in the short term, in the long run, and how it all come apart could be very disturbing circa 1793 France, the human element will rebound. Will we see self-checkout at grocery stores taken away for humans once again? Will there be work from home operators instead of AI call routing? It’s hard to imagine just what a collapse of the high point of human productivity (and general repression of lower economic classes through insurance and wage stagnation tracing back decades) but it is a cyclical historical framework.
In short, whatever it is, it’s going to be pretty ugly and potentially break apart the US Federal structure because the rifts are beyond closing. AI is simply the gasoline on the fire. True fear and loathing my friends…
It is increasing my ability and productivity beyond belief and I see incredible potential.
The author mentions they don’t think it is a bubble necessarily but that we will have lots of GPUs, however I seriously doubt anything other than more AI will be the result of lots of GPUs.
It's that the amount of investment outpaces the current value of return.
Think about the internet. Everyone rushed in and billions was spent. But we never stopped getting utility from the internet. In fact utility likely increased during the bust, which is why there was a 2nd boom in 2003, which may have continued had the GFC not occurred.
How?
I have used it and it IS a bubble.
Why? There are lots of free AI models that one can run on a Macbook, and even hosted AI models are racing themselves to $0.
There will be a crash and this so-called "AGI" will takeaway more jobs than it creates. [0]
It's no secret that in 2030, it will become a reality as we already have accelerated layoffs and it isn't going to stop.
It appears in this hype cycle, it is the year 1999.
[0] https://www.weforum.org/publications/the-future-of-jobs-repo...
It can get basic front-end react apps done but nothing beyond that.
But since front-end programming wasn't ever really programming, I don't mind that and I sometimes use it for that.
For everything else, it just makes a massive mess.
It's good to ask it questions about pretty common topics and get a cleaner reply than searching stuff yourself on Google and going through spam articles.
But any sort of insight or any sort of new learning, it just simply doesn't have it.
Furthermore, all of the hyping of research assistants for $20,000 and all of that is just absolute bullshit.
And no, there is no AGI coming.
