this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2025
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Fuck AI
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To play the devils advocate. Someone some where every day has been calling for a massive crash since the last massive crash. Their thesis is based whatever current events are at the time.
That aside. I think the so called AI bubble is distracting from something worse. The west has not been inventing or producing anything in a long time. The prevailing zeitgeist had shifted to a greater-fool pyramid-scheme type mindset. It happened a long time ago. Long before AI.
Everyone believes they're smart for thinking they can park their money in the right investments and live passively off others doing the hard work. Nobody wants to work anymore.
Sorry (not sorry) if that last sentence makes Lemmy users irate like it does on other social media. I don't know if it does or doesn't. But I think it's true.
It's not just billionaires scooping up all the wealth. People have been fighting each other for the scraps too.
If the so called AI bubble bursts. I think a bigger domino falls. The one where everyone has to face a sobering reality. They all thought they were smarter than each other by trying to get rich off the other person doing all the work. Which has led us to a point where nobody has been doing anything. Not inventing new things. Not producing good product. Not manufacturing anything. Doing nothing but watching imaginary lines go up. This is not just AI but the whole of society has come to be built on this mindset.
Everything has been hyper-capitalized. The kid with a lemonade stand has been trying to figuring out how he can minmax his investment by giving you a tiniest pinch of lemonade powder per cup of water. It's crazy times. Not just the AI industry.
The problems related to over-indebtedness and the high risk levels in Banking after the Glass-Steagal was overturned and which led to the 2008 Crash were never solved.
Instead what was done was the "hack" of lowering interest rates to levels far below the Historical Trend, supposedly temporarily, but in fact they never went back to trend (just like growth itself, fell well below that trend and never recovered back to it). The technique used reduced the costs of servicing the debt (if interest rates are lower, then the interest on that debt that needs to regularly be paid is less, which all things together means the Economy doesn't need to create quite as much new wealth to service debt) whilst not actually solving the problems of overindebtness.
Further, Finance Industry regulations never went back to what they were under Glass-Steagal and similar - some things were tightened but at the same time the concept of Too Big To Fail banks rose, which means large banking institutions know they will always be saved by the State no matter what, hence take more risks.
Basically, the whole system has taken a turn towards the road to Stagnation under the hope that somehow a path back to growth would be found, and that hasn't happened and instead what we have is all that cheap money feeding a string of speculative bubbles in things that don't in any way add to our productive ability - or in other words: to our ability to create wealth - and just blow up after a while having done nothing else than move money around and misallocated resources which were thus wasted, thus pushing us deeper in the road to stagnation.
It's funny to me that when you read literature about investments they always say over and over that past performance does not indicate future gains while an extremely common piece of "same" advice passed around is that total market index funds are good because they typically rise ~x% a year. All of it is based on the idea that things just grow. Because they've always grown. But past performance can't indicate future gains.
I don’t think that’s quite the same. The companies that are “in” index funds change, so it’s more like investing in the top X companies at any given time. In theory, you’d only be investing in companies that are innovating and doing things.
Not saying you’re wrong about things assuming to always grow, just pointing out that it’s not quite the same thing.