3 ms·

How to burst the AI bubble: Strike at its roots

66 points by 0nce 3mo ago

cedws 3mo ago
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.
- RealityVoid 3mo ago
  If that is true, they are incredibly stupid. Empowered workers create better, more effective companies.
  - ramon156 3mo ago
    But they also create workers that can hop off the ship. If they're on a sinking one, they have no choice but to work hard to get back to shore.
    - RealityVoid 3mo ago
      > But they also create workers that can hop off the ship. Sounds to me like a win for the workers, a win for the employer(in that they get better companies) and a win for society at large.
  - watwut 3mo ago
    I don't think CEO class want better, more effective companies. They have nothing to gain by that. They want monopoly situation for themselves, locked customers and helpless dependent employees.
    - alansaber 3mo ago
      It depends but obviously they want both, both control and value.
      - deltoidmaximus 3mo ago
        Enough control will create value for them anyway, it just might be at the expense of everyone else.
- jgalt212 3mo ago
  As a business owner I assure you I am not overly obsessed with labor costs. I obsess on all costs, and all revenues. VC funded and public companies may or may not take a similarly holistic view.
dude250711 3mo ago
Bubbles do not have roots.
- chrisweekly 3mo ago
  I agree the mixed metaphor and grammar are a bit awkward, but "its" refers to AI, innit?
bsenftner 3mo ago
[flagged]
- jhbadger 3mo ago
  While that's a bit cruel, I do have to wonder how exactly Doctorow got in the position he has -- he isn't somebody who has done great things and is now a tech critic like someone like Geoffrey Hinton. He seems a pleasant enough fellow, but basically he got fame from writing SF books that he gave away for free. How does this translate into being an expert that journalists fawn over?
  - JuniperMesos 3mo ago
    Journalists fawn over many people who write for public consumption in some way (book authors, academics, etc.), and who already agree with the point of view the journalists want to promulgate. I don't think Doctorow has particularly more insight about AI than anyone else does, but I also don't think that "insight about AI" is the main reason Ars Technica chose to publish an interview with him - they did this because Ars Technica has an anti-AI editorial position and so they find it useful to promote Doctorow's anti-AI-book. A different group of journalists who did not have an anti-AI editorial position would not have interviewed and published Doctorow, or at least not done so under as friendly circumstances as Ars Technica did.
    - jappgar 3mo ago
      Is this supposed to be surprising?
  - Npovview 3mo ago
    Has Doctorow implemented Transfomer from scratch as Lesswrong wants us to atleast pass the smell test?
  - mitthrowaway2 3mo ago
    He's also been a vocal advocate about copyright reform and against DRM, and his arguments are coherent and generally well-regarded among the tech crowd. In context, "giving away books for free" is a particularly strong form of putting his money where his mouth is.
cryo32 3mo ago
Just wait for the economics to catch up and eat the marketing. No effort required.
- dgellow 3mo ago
  Though, the larger the bubble becomes the more damaging the pop will be
  - jgalt212 3mo ago
    That's my real fear, that I have massive indirect AI bubble exposure while having zero direct exposure. Similar to how relatively few Americans had liar loans, but we all got burned by the subprime crisis. And then there were those bad actors that made the crisis work for them, and we got burned again during the uneven recovery.
- sph 3mo ago
  With everybody investing on index funds, directly or indirectly through their 401k, does economics ever have a time to catch up? Being out of the market during the crazy hype means losing out on "easy" gains, so basically it keeps going up and up, these companies get even more hyped, and I wonder what's the end game. I keep hearing that retail investors are just small fry and have no power to affect any stock's valuation, but certainly the hype spreads to big money as well. Even if I'm way off the mark, I would love to read about what happens to the economy in the mathematically plausible case that people keep buying and no one ever sells enough to mitigate the hype.
  - nh23423fefe 3mo ago
    The endgame is owning equity assets which represent ownership in companies that make profits? I hold these valuable assets and then sell them in the future. What else could it be? The assets are valuable because they represent ownership of the most productive companies on the planet?
- NoGravitas 3mo ago
  https://theonion.com/fbi-uncovers-al-qaeda-plot-to-just-sit-back-and-enjoy-c-1819576375/ https://theonion.com/fbi-uncovers-al-qaeda-plot-to-just-sit-...
pydry 3mo ago
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.
- xnx 3mo ago
  > The bubble is weirdly being kept alive by the promise it can replace software developers And lawyers, and doctors, and tax preparers, and financial managers...
  - mrngld 3mo ago
    People seem to think it's all smoke and mirrors. IDK. My employer, in an industry as far removed from Silicon Valley as you can probably get, makes more and better use of it all the time. There's enormous amounts of work done every day in corporate America that amounts to "I need X, but X involves some data from legacy system Y and legacy system Z, and that's going to take me an hour to glue together because our entire enterprise runs on a system cobbled together over the past 50 years". You know what Codex/Cowork/etc can do really stunningly good these days? Take the files you provide, listen to what you want from them, ask clarifying questions as necessary, then write a script that programmatically does exactly what you ask for, checks its own work and then gives you the result. We also realized that a project we thought was going to involve thousands of man-hours of very expensive, senior draftsperson labor to backport a feature into decades of CAD files we could, after years of procrastination, just forget! AI has got to the point where it can see and count what we need for us with greater accuracy, in our tests, than our very best humans, so we can just make the change going forward and let AI read the old files as needed. There's incremental commercial adoption of that nature that I'm sure is happening slowly across the corporate spectrum, and that kind of thing is durable demand, not a bubble. Note though that I'm talking about real revenue, etc. Not stock market bubbles. The feds been inflating that junk since the housing bust. We'll all pay for that eventually.
dist-epoch 3mo ago
[flagged]
- 4gotunameagain 3mo ago
  And yet you choose to enshitify the comments of this thread
- croes 3mo ago
  Sounds more like a simpleton than a simple man.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
anksarora123 3mo ago
[flagged]
vkou 3mo ago
> “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.
- samvher 3mo ago
  Interesting challenge. 1 - I worked abroad and wasn't really familiar with the systems there. Gemini made me aware of a kind of pension account that I could withdraw from when I left the country netting me a few thousand dollars. 2 - Working as a tech contractor, charging by deliverable, Codex/Claude Code speed me up and it doesn't seem to have significantly dropped rates in the market. 3 - Also contractor related: I had Claude do a quick legal sanity check of my contracts, and it warned me of some clauses that I'd be better off removing/changing/refining. I was not aware of these nuances and would not have paid a lawyer for this as the contract was too small, but the changes were accepted by the client and reduced my risk exposure meaningfully. 4 - Learning a foreign language, I use it to check my draft emails and messages. It corrects them but also serves a tutoring role providing feedback, improving both the accuracy of my communication and my rate of language acquisition. 5 - Gemini Deep Research helped me narrow down tent models that met my fairly specific set of requirements. Very happy with the tent I ended up buying, from a brand that was not on my radar before.
- watwut 3mo ago
  I can name three: - better speech to text, - better auto translation, - better image to text. Other then that, I hate how AI is inserted into everything, how I cant tell anyone I did something without them telling me I could have use AI for it, the doom trolling , the AIG singularity bullshit as if it was new incoming god rather then a set of technologies.
- beej71 3mo ago
  It's allowed me to learn things more quickly. For example, I haven't written any C++ professionally for 20 years, and found myself in the position of needing to know it again. The existing material online for learning it is thick; sometimes I have a question that isn't answered directly or clearly in any way I can find with a standard search. I can grill the LLM much more quickly and pointedly. However, this does not answer the usefulness-at-work question. Does anyone care if I know how the initializer list braces in constructor `Foo{1,2}` work? Today for hiring managers smitten with AI, seems like they don't. Personally, I'm just trying to stay sharp on the off-chance that things crash out and people who know how to engineer *and* code become highly valuable. If not, I'll be doing something else, anyway.
aaron695 3mo ago
[dead]
feverzsj 3mo ago
It's kinda too big to fail in US now. If it bursts, US will decline quickly.
- nixon_why69 3mo ago
  It's not, though. The banking system holds onto everyone's money in a fractional reserve system, if you let a run on the banks happen everyone's money is gone. That's "too big to fail". If anthropic and openAI fail, the top 10% lose half their money in a stock sell-off. That's perfectly tolerable. Maybe congress bails them out anyways but they don't have to.
  - Avicebron 3mo ago
    If they get bailed out with taxpayer dollers they better maje damn sure the taxpayers are getting immediate tangible benefits (as in cash or free mythos class AI every month at a minimum). Sama can go beg on the streets, we'll keep the tech.
- nxm 3mo ago
  So you’re going to be shorting AI stocks?
gsky 3mo ago
AI spending is all what keeping american economy afloat or else a big recession
alansaber 3mo ago
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).
- tim333 3mo ago
  I find the industrial revolution parallels interesting too. I figure we're in the steam age and this is a bit like the railway bubble. Or maybe a bit before that - I'm not sure current AI is as useful as railways.
spwa4 3mo ago
"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 3mo ago
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 3mo ago
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 3mo ago
Didn’t this man just release enshittification? He’s killing it from north of the border
jopython 3mo ago
AI is necessary evil.

66 points by 0nce 3mo ago

cedws 3mo ago

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.

RealityVoid 3mo ago
If that is true, they are incredibly stupid. Empowered workers create better, more effective companies.
- ramon156 3mo ago
  But they also create workers that can hop off the ship. If they're on a sinking one, they have no choice but to work hard to get back to shore.
  - RealityVoid 3mo ago
    > But they also create workers that can hop off the ship. Sounds to me like a win for the workers, a win for the employer(in that they get better companies) and a win for society at large.
- watwut 3mo ago
  I don't think CEO class want better, more effective companies. They have nothing to gain by that. They want monopoly situation for themselves, locked customers and helpless dependent employees.
  - alansaber 3mo ago
    It depends but obviously they want both, both control and value.
    - deltoidmaximus 3mo ago
      Enough control will create value for them anyway, it just might be at the expense of everyone else.
jgalt212 3mo ago
As a business owner I assure you I am not overly obsessed with labor costs. I obsess on all costs, and all revenues. VC funded and public companies may or may not take a similarly holistic view.

dude250711 3mo ago

Bubbles do not have roots.

chrisweekly 3mo ago
I agree the mixed metaphor and grammar are a bit awkward, but "its" refers to AI, innit?

bsenftner 3mo ago

[flagged]

jhbadger 3mo ago
While that's a bit cruel, I do have to wonder how exactly Doctorow got in the position he has -- he isn't somebody who has done great things and is now a tech critic like someone like Geoffrey Hinton. He seems a pleasant enough fellow, but basically he got fame from writing SF books that he gave away for free. How does this translate into being an expert that journalists fawn over?
- JuniperMesos 3mo ago
  Journalists fawn over many people who write for public consumption in some way (book authors, academics, etc.), and who already agree with the point of view the journalists want to promulgate. I don't think Doctorow has particularly more insight about AI than anyone else does, but I also don't think that "insight about AI" is the main reason Ars Technica chose to publish an interview with him - they did this because Ars Technica has an anti-AI editorial position and so they find it useful to promote Doctorow's anti-AI-book. A different group of journalists who did not have an anti-AI editorial position would not have interviewed and published Doctorow, or at least not done so under as friendly circumstances as Ars Technica did.
  - jappgar 3mo ago
    Is this supposed to be surprising?
- Npovview 3mo ago
  Has Doctorow implemented Transfomer from scratch as Lesswrong wants us to atleast pass the smell test?
- mitthrowaway2 3mo ago
  He's also been a vocal advocate about copyright reform and against DRM, and his arguments are coherent and generally well-regarded among the tech crowd. In context, "giving away books for free" is a particularly strong form of putting his money where his mouth is.

cryo32 3mo ago

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

dgellow 3mo ago
Though, the larger the bubble becomes the more damaging the pop will be
- jgalt212 3mo ago
  That's my real fear, that I have massive indirect AI bubble exposure while having zero direct exposure. Similar to how relatively few Americans had liar loans, but we all got burned by the subprime crisis. And then there were those bad actors that made the crisis work for them, and we got burned again during the uneven recovery.
sph 3mo ago
With everybody investing on index funds, directly or indirectly through their 401k, does economics ever have a time to catch up? Being out of the market during the crazy hype means losing out on "easy" gains, so basically it keeps going up and up, these companies get even more hyped, and I wonder what's the end game. I keep hearing that retail investors are just small fry and have no power to affect any stock's valuation, but certainly the hype spreads to big money as well. Even if I'm way off the mark, I would love to read about what happens to the economy in the mathematically plausible case that people keep buying and no one ever sells enough to mitigate the hype.
- nh23423fefe 3mo ago
  The endgame is owning equity assets which represent ownership in companies that make profits? I hold these valuable assets and then sell them in the future. What else could it be? The assets are valuable because they represent ownership of the most productive companies on the planet?
NoGravitas 3mo ago
https://theonion.com/fbi-uncovers-al-qaeda-plot-to-just-sit-back-and-enjoy-c-1819576375/ https://theonion.com/fbi-uncovers-al-qaeda-plot-to-just-sit-...

pydry 3mo ago

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.

xnx 3mo ago
> The bubble is weirdly being kept alive by the promise it can replace software developers And lawyers, and doctors, and tax preparers, and financial managers...
- mrngld 3mo ago
  People seem to think it's all smoke and mirrors. IDK. My employer, in an industry as far removed from Silicon Valley as you can probably get, makes more and better use of it all the time. There's enormous amounts of work done every day in corporate America that amounts to "I need X, but X involves some data from legacy system Y and legacy system Z, and that's going to take me an hour to glue together because our entire enterprise runs on a system cobbled together over the past 50 years". You know what Codex/Cowork/etc can do really stunningly good these days? Take the files you provide, listen to what you want from them, ask clarifying questions as necessary, then write a script that programmatically does exactly what you ask for, checks its own work and then gives you the result. We also realized that a project we thought was going to involve thousands of man-hours of very expensive, senior draftsperson labor to backport a feature into decades of CAD files we could, after years of procrastination, just forget! AI has got to the point where it can see and count what we need for us with greater accuracy, in our tests, than our very best humans, so we can just make the change going forward and let AI read the old files as needed. There's incremental commercial adoption of that nature that I'm sure is happening slowly across the corporate spectrum, and that kind of thing is durable demand, not a bubble. Note though that I'm talking about real revenue, etc. Not stock market bubbles. The feds been inflating that junk since the housing bust. We'll all pay for that eventually.

dist-epoch 3mo ago

[flagged]

4gotunameagain 3mo ago
And yet you choose to enshitify the comments of this thread
croes 3mo ago
Sounds more like a simpleton than a simple man.
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]

anksarora123 3mo ago

[flagged]

vkou 3mo ago

> “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.

samvher 3mo ago
Interesting challenge. 1 - I worked abroad and wasn't really familiar with the systems there. Gemini made me aware of a kind of pension account that I could withdraw from when I left the country netting me a few thousand dollars. 2 - Working as a tech contractor, charging by deliverable, Codex/Claude Code speed me up and it doesn't seem to have significantly dropped rates in the market. 3 - Also contractor related: I had Claude do a quick legal sanity check of my contracts, and it warned me of some clauses that I'd be better off removing/changing/refining. I was not aware of these nuances and would not have paid a lawyer for this as the contract was too small, but the changes were accepted by the client and reduced my risk exposure meaningfully. 4 - Learning a foreign language, I use it to check my draft emails and messages. It corrects them but also serves a tutoring role providing feedback, improving both the accuracy of my communication and my rate of language acquisition. 5 - Gemini Deep Research helped me narrow down tent models that met my fairly specific set of requirements. Very happy with the tent I ended up buying, from a brand that was not on my radar before.
watwut 3mo ago
I can name three: - better speech to text, - better auto translation, - better image to text. Other then that, I hate how AI is inserted into everything, how I cant tell anyone I did something without them telling me I could have use AI for it, the doom trolling , the AIG singularity bullshit as if it was new incoming god rather then a set of technologies.
beej71 3mo ago
It's allowed me to learn things more quickly. For example, I haven't written any C++ professionally for 20 years, and found myself in the position of needing to know it again. The existing material online for learning it is thick; sometimes I have a question that isn't answered directly or clearly in any way I can find with a standard search. I can grill the LLM much more quickly and pointedly. However, this does not answer the usefulness-at-work question. Does anyone care if I know how the initializer list braces in constructor `Foo{1,2}` work? Today for hiring managers smitten with AI, seems like they don't. Personally, I'm just trying to stay sharp on the off-chance that things crash out and people who know how to engineer *and* code become highly valuable. If not, I'll be doing something else, anyway.

aaron695 3mo ago

[dead]

feverzsj 3mo ago

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

nixon_why69 3mo ago
It's not, though. The banking system holds onto everyone's money in a fractional reserve system, if you let a run on the banks happen everyone's money is gone. That's "too big to fail". If anthropic and openAI fail, the top 10% lose half their money in a stock sell-off. That's perfectly tolerable. Maybe congress bails them out anyways but they don't have to.
- Avicebron 3mo ago
  If they get bailed out with taxpayer dollers they better maje damn sure the taxpayers are getting immediate tangible benefits (as in cash or free mythos class AI every month at a minimum). Sama can go beg on the streets, we'll keep the tech.
nxm 3mo ago
So you’re going to be shorting AI stocks?

gsky 3mo ago

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

alansaber 3mo ago

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).

tim333 3mo ago
I find the industrial revolution parallels interesting too. I figure we're in the steam age and this is a bit like the railway bubble. Or maybe a bit before that - I'm not sure current AI is as useful as railways.

spwa4 3mo ago

"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 3mo ago

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 3mo ago

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 3mo ago

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

jopython 3mo ago

AI is necessary evil.