AI Is Starting to Look Like the Dot Com Bubble
AI Is Starting to Look Like the Dot Com Bubble
As the AI market continues to balloon, experts are warning that its VC-driven rise is eerily similar to that of the dot com bubble.
As the AI market continues to balloon, experts are warning that its VC-driven rise is eerily similar to that of the dot com bubble.
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Perhaps we're talking to different points. Parent comment said that investors are always looking for better and better returns. You said that's how progress works. This sentiment is was my quibble.
I took the "investors are always looking for better returns" to mean "unethically so" and was more talking about what happens long term. Reading your above I think you might have been talking about good faith.
In a sound system that's how things work, sure! The company gets investment into tech and continue to improve and the investors get to enjoy the progress's returns.
That's not what I interpreted the parent as saying. He said
Investors are always looking for the next small thing that will make them big money.
Which I think my interpretation fits just fine - investors would like to put their money into something new that will become successful, that's how they make big money.
The word "ethical" has become heavily abused in discussions of AI over the past six months or so, IMO. It's frequently being used as a thought-terminating cliche, where people declare "such-and-such approach is how you do ethical AI" and then anyone who disagrees can be labelled as supporting "unethical" approaches. I try to avoid it as much as possible in these discussions. Instead, I prefer a utilitarian approach when evaluating these things. What results in the best outcome for the most number of people? What exactly is a "best outcome" anyway?
In the case of investment, I like a system where people put money into companies that are able to use that money to create new goods and services that didn't exist before. That outcome is what I call "progress." There are lots of tricky caveats, of course. Since it's hard to tell ahead of time what ideas will be successful and what won't, it's hard to come up with rules to prohibit scams while still allowing legitimate ideas have their chance. It's especially tricky because even failed ideas can still result in societal benefits if they get their chance to try. Very often the company that blazes a new trail ends up not being the company that successfully monetizes it in the long term, but we still needed that trailblazer to create the right conditions.
So yes, these "bubbles" have negative side effects. But they have positive ones too, and it's hard to disentangle those from each other.
I appreciate the effort, but I was not critiquing your reading. Moreso that I took it differently. That's just a misread on my part and my point was not about general investing as a proxy for progress/a driver.
No problem. I've got tangled up in "disagreements" where it turned out everyone was talking about different unrelated things before, hence the big blob of text elaborating my position in detail. Just wanted to make sure.
Yeah, I appreciate the nuance too! It's just I don't have anything to really add as I'm the one who misread!