I'm hoping for the AI bubble to pop. I want to see Nvidia and X and Tesla and Microslop and OpenAI all crash and burn.
But there's another part of me that knows there's a good historical precedent for what happens in these situations. My brain is zapped but Larry Fink was the architect of the previous market crash that led to BlackRock profiteering wildly and becoming the immense beast that it is today.
I know that the big AI companies/AI affiliated companies are what is keeping the US economy afloat at the moment and I know the US will play the "too big to fail" card to do yet-another immense transfer of wealth from the proles directly to these companies in the form of bailouts.
I don't think AI-only companies are gonna survive this. I think OpenAI might be the first domino to fall. But Google commands a vast amount of diversified income sources, unlike OpenAI, and I wonder if almost every other big player in AI will get swept under but, with big bailouts and the power that Google commands, it feels like they will be poised to gobble up all the smaller fish and expand their monopoly to integrate themselves into every level of government administration as the government cuts back on expenditures to weather the fallout from the bubble popping plus the immense cost of bailouts, so I can see it being a Faustian bargain where money goes into Google (either directly or indirectly), Google vacuums up all the business and especially the data centers, then Google offers the insolvent US government the "solution" of selling them terminals for every citizen interfacing role that runs on AI and embedding AI in all sorts of bureaucratic processes that occur mostly behind the scenes. For a "small" fee, of course. (Or maybe Palantir or some scumfuck company like Larry Ellison's swoops in and profiteers from the fire sale as the market burns.)
(I'd explain all the fuckery with Larry Fink and BlackRock and how I anticipate the parallels to play out this time around but there's a lot of threads and I'd have to have the brain power available to brush up on the sources and weave the narrative together but that's not gonna happen for me today. Has TrueAnon covered BlackRock yet?)
Strange to think that the scenario of the AI bubble popping and causing all sorts of economic catastrophe for the working class people around the world while the US starts to crumble and descend into fascism and civil war is my optimistic take and that my doomer take is that AI collapses but it doesn't take the market with it and instead AI gets monopolized, bailed out, and forcibly integrated into all levels of society while the US descends into fascism and civil war.
I think we are disagreeing on words and agreeing on the points here.
What I'm trying to say is that I'm not concerned about the monopoly, not really, and whether it's a bubble pop or AI profits crash or the whole economy goes belly-up, my real concern is not about the economic implications directly so much as I'm concerned that a lot of people are banking on the event as being the moment were we will revert to an AI-free world, or at least one that is the early days of AI where it was mostly used as a resource on tap rather than being embedded in everything but I see a good chance that we're in a situation where we are never gonna get the toothpaste back in that tube.
My worry is that when the instability in the current situation is so untenable that it has its inevitable rupture, however you think that rupture will take shape, that it won't be the moment that society is liberated from under the yoke of AI but instead it's going to be a moment of fire sales and consolidation where AI concentrates into the hands of one or two big players and the agenda to further embed AI and foster more dependence in the pursuit of profit will accelerate as the era of the AI wild west will give way to a more "responsible" and conservative type of AI business model (i.e. Google's model instead of Grok's profiteering from spouting edgelord Nazi rhetoric and producing nonconsensual pornography of people) whose advance is effectively inexorable.
The question in my mind is this: "What if an AI crash doesn't lead to AI being wound back but instead it advances the interests of and consolidates the power of a big player and this means that level of AI integration of society we see today will become the new normal, or what if it becomes the low point that people will look back on with nostalgia?"