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> People have been conditioned on expecting the next big thing, FOMO on trillion dollar companies, winner-takes-all etc. as if that is the new normal. People h

> People have been conditioned on expecting the next big thing, FOMO on trillion dollar companies, winner-takes-all etc. as if that is the new normal. People have been FOMO investing since the start of investment opportunities. Tulip Mania was a famous bubble in the 1600s. Even when people mostly predict the future correctly, they can be too early like with the dot com bubble (the internet seems to mostly have worked out and arguably beyond the expectations of most of the dot com speculators). AI could very well bring major improvements to productivity at some point, but if it happens, will it be while current speculators can stay solvent or will they be too early in the same way dot com speculators were?

nologic01 3y ago
> will it be while current speculators can stay solvent or will they be too early in the same way dot com speculators were? I wouldn't want to hazard a guess. Speculative tendency is a given as an underlying driver, though it can be modulated by the structure of financial instruments, markets, interest rates, taxation etc. What is not a given is that FOMO will be continuously expressed every few years just so that a number of savvy intermediaries can keep banking on that collective defect. Manias are also generational phenomena - people do get burned out. I do have a feeling that currently we have collectively "burned-out" from the promised tech disruption. I may well be wrong and a powerful idea that is not subject to all the above caveats is now incubating somewhere in the long tail. An interesting question is whether we will see it here on HN.