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Uh … AI bubble costing the US as much money in 12 months as *two major wars over 13 years* is quite the buried lede!
"If it can't go on forever it will stop." — economist Herb Stein, 1985. (The "it" is a placeholder for any economic process.)
https://researchbuzz.masto.host/@researchbuzz/115782207999466966
@cstross According to this analyst the AI bubble is “17 times bigger than the dot-com bubble and four times bigger than the 2008 real-estate bubble.”
https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/18/business/ai-bubble-analyst-nightcap
According to another article I read the US would be in a recession right now if it wasn’t for AI investment, which is essentially privately-funded stimulus spending at a massive level.
@cstross I am increasingly convinced the AI bubble exists solely to sell the idea of being able to do everything as a means of concentrating money.
The point is to participate in a mammonite magic to have all the of the love of god (that is, all the money) and the thinking involved is as completely detached from any material concern as a stylite.
(The "and everything will be easy!" part is something of a tell, here; that's the language of attaining paradise, not material ambition.)
@cstross All the other stuff—the general obnubilation of factual knowledge, the extirpation of labour, the unbounded consumption—is just the general nature of paradise to the CEO class, existence free of obligation.
@graydon @cstross The AI in the search engine defines "obnubilation" in French and translates it to English as "obsession"; further down the page, Merriam Webster defines it as "mental cloudiness and torpidity" and Collins defines it as "the process or fact of making dimmer, darker, or obscure".
The AI is obnubilating my understanding of "obnubilation".
@cstross I worry how much their collapse will drag down the rest of the world.
At a time when there are larger clearer tasks for all hands than ever before.
@Photo55 Planetary GNP is on the order of $80-100Tn/year. So this means up to 1.5% of the global economic product will evaporate if the bubble bursts right now. But there's a lot more 2nd-order activity hanging on it, eg. construction, manufacturing. I expect the AI bubble to trigger a full-scale global depression when it pops, not just a US one. 1929 all over again. Or even 1873/1893.
@cstross @Photo55 I've done the math on it. It's actually significantly more than that. Including supply chain impact, it's anywhere from 5-15% of global GDP with a much, much higher percentage in the US.
But that's the small fry shit. Remember 2008? Took less than 10 years to repeat and crank it up orders of magnitude higher with bad loans and new forms of CDOs.
The entire foundation is completely fucked.
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