The AI dooooooom thread

[crazy canuck]

This century has been a profound disappointment.

Yep.

And it became disappointing almost immediately. There were very few times when it even teased us that things might work out well.

I dunno, up till 2008 things were looking to be on track.

No, things were looking to be on track up until September 11, 2001.

[crazy canuck]

Four of the tech industry's wealthiest companies made it clear this week that their spending on artificial intelligence was not about to slow down.

But the outlays from Google, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon — which all raised their spending by billions of dollars, saying they needed to meet demand for A.I. — are increasingly feeding concerns that the tech industry is heading toward a dangerous bubble.

Artificial intelligence remains an unproven and expensive technology that could take years to fully develop. How much companies will ultimately get back in return from A.I. products like chatbots is unclear. And smaller companies pursuing A.I. gold, financial analysts pointed out, are not nearly as wealthy.

Last week, the Bank of England wrote that while the building of data centers, which provide computing power for A.I., had so far largely come from the cash produced by the biggest companies, it would increasingly involve more debt. If A.I. underwhelms — or the systems ultimately require far less computing — there could be growing risk.

For the rest of the article

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/31/technology/ai-spending-accelerating.html?unlocked_article_code=1.xk8.4zu2.pTkWIH--g3Cj&smid=url-share

[Jacob]

The Atlantic on Here's How the AI Crash Happens

[Josquius]

This century has been a profound disappointment.

Yep.

And it became disappointing almost immediately. There were very few times when it even teased us that things might work out well.

I dunno, up till 2008 things were looking to be on track.

No, things were looking to be on track up until September 11, 2001.

Maybe things were different in NA, but in the UK things were still very much on the up despite the period of Islamic paranoia.
The economy continued to improve, life steadily became better, deprived areas rebuilt, etc...
It really wasn't until the financial crisis that things truly broke and austerity sent things plumetting.
This is shown by data and my own experiences.

[Sheilbh]

I think it very much depends where you're looking from - the famous elephant curve to include post-crash:


Most of us, like most of the Western middle class happen to broadly be in that B section and it's not been great. A great example from Branko Milanovic, is in Italy as they've not grown over the last two decades. The lowest decile of Italians in 1988 were in the 73rd global percentile; by 2008 lower income Italians are now down to the 56th global percentile. By now they're probably lower (possibly even in the bottom half of the world). There are similar processes across the west, Italy's just an extreme. Obviously for some real income actually fell, but for many it didn't - it's just the rest of the world is growing faster in a fundamental and transformative way. I think this is tied to both migration and tourism - and the pressures they're producing - we're moving from a world of the 90s when they were basically luxury goods that were limited to one where they are available to a huge global middle class of which we are just one part.

In other respects I similarly don't know. There's techno-pessimism and understandably, but the lives of many millions of people have been transformed by technology in the last twenty five years. Some of that reflects very admirable policies - first to mind is PEPFAR and the huge downgrading of AIDS as a global health risk from the turn of the century. But others just spreading of technology like phones across Africa and India helping change people's lives and also tying people in to global networks of remittances but also the famous example of farmers being able to get better, more up to date info from their phones. The world is probably less democratic within states compared to 2000, but power is distributed more democratically between states (because of that economic story) - I think there's going to be a dynamic between those two and both the national and individual desire for recognition.

I think there are the conditions of technology and more equal global distribution of wealth and power for a better and more hopeful world (albeit one that I think would be disorienting for the West). But also for a far more alarming future. The thing that freaks me out most to be honest is the increasing fusion of state and corporate power around the world.

[Razgovory]

This century has been a profound disappointment.

Yep.

And it became disappointing almost immediately. There were very few times when it even teased us that things might work out well.

I was telling my coworker, who is only 18, how when I was 18* the biggest political crisis was the President getting a blow job.  She had no idea what I was talking about.  She didn't know Bill Clinton was impeached and how most everyone just laughed it off.  I miss the days when politics was simply stupid rather than stupid and scary.

*Technically I think I was 16 when that happened, but you get the idea.