I’ve been hit by inspiration whilst dicking about on Discord - felt like making some off-the-cuff predictions on what will happen once the AI bubble bursts. (Mainly because I had a bee in my bonnet that was refusing to fuck off.)
- A Full-Blown Tech Crash
Its no secret the industry’s put all their chips into AI - basically every public company’s chasing it to inflate their stock prices, NVidia’s making money hand-over-fist playing gold rush shovel seller, and every exec’s been hyping it like its gonna change the course of humanity.
Additionally, going by Baldur Bjarnason, tech’s chief goal with this bubble is to prop up the notion of endless growth so it can continue reaping the benefits for just a bit longer.
If and when the tech bubble pops, I expect a full-blown crash in the tech industry (much like Ed Zitron’s predicting), with revenues and stock prices going through the floor and layoffs left and right. Additionally, I’m expecting those stock prices will likely take a while to recover, if ever, as tech likely comes to be viewed either as a stable, mature industry that’s no longer experiencing nonstop growth or as an industry experiencing a full-blown malaise era, with valuations and stock prices getting savaged as Wall Street comes to see tech companies as high risk investments at best and money pits at worst. (Missed this incomplete sentence several times)
Chance: Near-Guaranteed. I’m pretty much certain on this, and expect it to happen sometime this year.
- A Decline in Tech/STEM Students/Graduates
Extrapolating a bit from Prediction 1, I suspect we might see a lot less people going into tech/STEM degrees if tech crashes like I expect.
The main thing which drew so many people to those degrees, at least from what I could see, was the notion that they’d make you a lotta money - if tech publicly crashes and burns like I expect, it’d blow a major hole in that notion.
Even if it doesn’t kill the notion entirely, I can see a fair number of students jumping ship at the sight of that notion being shaken.
Chance: Low/Moderate. I’ve got no solid evidence this prediction’s gonna come true, just a gut feeling. Epistemically speaking, I’m firing blind.
- Tech/STEM’s Public Image Changes - For The Worse
The AI bubble’s given us a pretty hefty amount of mockery-worthy shit - Mira Murati shitting on the artists OpenAI screwed over, Andrej Karpathy shitting on every movie made pre-'95, Sam Altman claiming AI will soon solve all of physics, Luma Labs publicly embarassing themselves, ProperPrompter recreating motion capture, But Worse^tm, Mustafa Suleyman treating everything on the 'Net as his to steal, et cetera, et cetera, et fucking cetera.
All the while, AI has been flooding the Internet with unholy slop, ruining Google search, cooking the planet, stealing everyone’s work (sometimes literally) in broad daylight, supercharging scams, killing livelihoods, exploiting the Global South and God-knows-what-the-fuck-else.
All of this has been a near-direct consequence of the development of large language models and generative AI.
Baldur Bjarnason has already mentioned AI being treated as a major red flag by many - a “tech asshole” signifier to be more specific - and the massive disconnect in sentiment tech has from the rest of the public. I suspect that “tech asshole” stench is gonna spread much quicker than he thinks.
Chance: Moderate/High. This one’s also based on a gut feeling, but with the stuff I’ve witnessed, I’m feeling much more confident with this than Prediction 2. Arguably, if the cultural rehabilitation of the Luddites is any indication, it might already be happening without my knowledge.
If you’ve got any other predictions, or want to put up some criticisms of mine, go ahead and comment.
On 1, I hope you are right that the AI bubble will burst soon.
I am less certain where the next bubble will be, but pretty certain there will be one. We have seen bubble after bubble during the neoliberal era where hot money inflates valuations in a sector, sells it as success and cash out, leaving the bag with banks, governments, pension funds or households. Then it crashes, causing more or less widespread devastation. But those that started the process are now richer and has more money to push into the next bubble, preferably something that is already growing.
So, apart from AI, what is growing now? Weapons manufacturers seem to be doing very well, and weapons and AI are also connected. So my prediction is that the next bubble will be weapons related, probably focused around AI powered drones. As the US is pressuring NATO governments to increase weapons spending, money will pour in directly from governments to the corporations. As long as the threat of on outbreak of peace can be averted, money will keep rolling in.
a little correction: it’s not the united states pressuring that makes the eu governments reconsider military spending, it’s the russia invading ukraine again and the full-scale war that followed. (the general tone of your comment suggests that you’re not aware that russia is at their most aggressive stance in decades).
ah, and before you start spewing bullshit in the style of chomsky or, goddess forbid, begin quoting the likes of mearsheimer, my advice is: don’t.
We could have a whole discussion about geopolitics, but lets not. This is after all a thread about the AI bubble and what comes next.
The 2% target is a economic expenditure target, not a military readiness target. I think it is kind of obvious that the west is supply constrained in arms, so what happens if every state tries to increase expenditures is that arms become more expensive. Profits go up, stock price go up, and presto you have a possible foundation for a new bubble.
i don’t think you understand the gravity of the situation.
this is an actual large scale conflict, a land war, and we need to finance very traditional sort of armaments and ammunition, because that’s what ukraine needs the most.
this requires ramping up actual production capacity, not just paying more for the same.
(i’m astonished, or rather really angry, that after two years there are still western fucking leftists who never did the minimal effort to learn what’s happening and are happy to talk in platitudes and exude the feeling of moral superiority. from our point of view in eastern europe, a large swathes of western left are just useless bumblefuckers; especially the american so-called democratic socialists.)
You’re in respectable company - Rodney Brooks also predicted an AI winter, “possibly a full-blown tech winter”, back in January: https://rodneybrooks.com/predictions-scorecard-2024-january-01/
Perhaps I’m not a sufficiently astute market-understander, but I’m not sure I’m seeing why this is so certain. Can you elaborate?
the VCs are already making doubtful noises about setting this much money on fire and investors are asking difficult questions like “when will it fucking work”
i woulda given it till end 2025 or so just from the trillions of dollars desperately looking for returns, but lotta other voices said by end Q4 2024
i mean we might all be wrong, sure
My own gut feeling (and I’m not a particularly astute market-understander) is that unless there is some spectacular failure, then simply how much the owning class wants to believe that AI can bring about a world where capital owners never have to pay for human cognitive or creative labour ever again would keep the money firehose going for very, very long.
(I completely agree, btw, with the observation about how the AI industry has made tech synonymous with “monstrous assholes” in a non-trivial chunk of public consciousness.)
