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.
Indeed. And it’s what progress in general is. Should we stop trying new things? Sometimes they don’t work, oh well. Sometimes they do, and it’s awesome.
You’re conflating creating dollar value with progress. Yes the technology moves the total net productivity of humankind forward.
Investing exists because we want to incentive that. Currently you and the thread above are describing bad actors coming in, seeing this small single digit productivity increase and misrepresenting it so that other investors buy in. Then dipping and causing the bubble to burst.
Something isn’t a ‘good’ investment just because it makes you 600% return. I could go rob someone if I wanted that return. Hell even if then killed that person by accident the net negative to human productivity would be less.
These bubbles unsettle homes, jobs, markets, and educations. Inefficiency that makes money for anyone in the stock market should have been crushed out.
No, progress is being driven by investment, it isn’t measured by investment. If some new startup gets a million billion dollars of investment that doesn’t by itself represent progress. If that startup then produces a new technology with that money then that is progress.
These “investment rushes” happen when a new kind of technology comes along and lots of companies are trying to develop it in a bunch of different ways. There’s lots of demand for investment in a situation like this and lots of people are willing to throw some money at them in hopes of a big return, so lots of investment happens and those companies try out a whole bunch of new tech with it. Some of them don’t pan out, but we won’t know which until they actually try them. As long as some of them do pan out then progress happens.
Just because some don’t pan out doesn’t mean that “bad actors” were involved. Sometimes ideas just don’t work out and you can’t know that they won’t until you try them.
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.
