Jeff Bezos Says AI Is in a Bubble but Society Will Get 'gigantic' Benefits

Banning advanced graph calculators on undergrad math exams is not because "they don't want to use new tools", either.

Will the contagion be limited to a few companies, or will the S&P crumble under the bubble's collapse?

Not web chat rooms.

Chats did not evolve to social media.

Facebook is a descendant of hotornot not icq or chats.

Ws was seen as free sms.

The trenches for the cables even longer than that.

To give a different example, right now, some of the most prized sites for renewable energy are former coal plant sites, because they already have big fat transmission lines ready to go. Yesterday's industrial parks are now today's gentrifying urban districts, and so on.

Not to mean that we're still nowhere near close to solving the broadband coverage problem, especially in less developed countries like the US and most of the third world. If anything, it seems like we're moving towards satellite internet and cellular for areas outside of the urban centers, and those are terrible for latency-sensitive applications like game streaming.

In fact, the technology was introduced out here assuming corporate / elite users. The market reality became such that telcos were forced kicking and screaming to open up networks to everybody. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (back then) mandated rural <> urban parity of sorts. This eventually forced telcos to share infrastructure costs (share towers etc.) The total call and data volumes are eye-watering, but low-yield (low ARPU). I could go on and on but it's just batshit crazy.

Now UPI has layered on top of that---once again, benefiting from Reserve Bank of India's mandate for zero-fee transactions, and participating via a formal data interchange protocol and format.

Speaking from India, having lived here all my life, and occasionally travelled abroad (USAmerica, S.E. Asia).

We, as a society and democracy, are also feeling the harsh, harsh hand of "Code is Law", and increasingly centralised control of communication utilities (which the telecoms are). The left hand of darkness comes with a lot of darkness, sadly.

Which brings me to the moniker of "third world".

This place is insane, my friend --- first, second, third, and fourth worlds all smashing into each others' faces all the time. In so many ways, we are more first world here than many western countries. I first visited USAmerica in 2015, and I could almost smell an empire in decline. Walking across twitter headquarters in downtown SF of all the places, avoiding needles and syringes strewn on the sidewalk, and avoiding the completely smashed guy just barely standing there, right there in the middle of it all.

That was insane.

Now we need X*0.75 people to do meet Y demand.

However, those savings are partially piped to consumers, and partially piped to owners.

There is only so much marginal propensity to spend that rich people have, so that additional wealth is not resulting in an increase in demand, at least commensurate enough to absorb the 25% who are unemployed or underemployed.

Ideally that money would be getting ploughed back into making new firms, or creating new work, but the work being created requires people with PHDs, and a few specific skills, which means that entire fields of people are not in the work force.

However all that money has to go somewhere, and so asset classes are rising in value, because there is no where else for it to go.

For sure, we can shop faster, and (attempt) research and admin faster. But…

Shopping: used to be fun. You’d go with friends or family, discuss the goods together, gossip, bump into people you knew, stop for a sandwich, maybe mix shopping and a cinema or dinner trip. All the while, you’d be aware of other peoples’ personal space, see their family dynamics. Queuing for event tickets brought you shoulder to shoulder with the crowd before the event began… Today, we do all this at home; strangers (and communities) are separated from us by glass, cables and satalites, rather than by air and shouting distance. I argue that this time saving is reducing our ability to socialise.

Research: this is definitely accelerated, and probably mostly for the better. But… some kinds of research were mingled with the “shopping” socialisation described above.

Admin: the happy path is now faster and functioning bureaucracy is smoother in the digital realm. But, it’s the edge cases which are now more painful. Elderly people struggle with digital tech and prefer face to face. Everyone is more open to more subtle and challenging threats (identity theft, fraud); we all have to learn complex and layered mitigation strategies. Also: digital systems are very fragile: they leak private data, they’re open to wider attack surfaces, they need more training and are harder to intuit without that training; they’re ripe for capture by monopolists (Google, Palantir).

The time and cost savings of all these are not felt by the users, or even the admins of these systems. The savings are felt only by the owners of the systems.

Technologgy has saved billions of person-hours individual costs, in travel, in physical work. Yet, wemre working longer, using fewer ranges of motions, are less fit, less able to tolerste others’ differences and the wealth gap is widening.

You can download a model. That doesn't necessarily mean you can download the best model and all the ancillary systems attached to it by whatever service. Just like you can download a web index but you probably cannot download google's index and certainly can't download their system of crawlers for keeping it up to date.