There's a possible fourth option: it's under-hyped and under-appreciated.
I'm both highly critical of much of present-day Silicon Valley (as a metonym for the high-tech industry itself, not merely some geographical region centred near Sunnyvale, CA), and of the view that developments of the current AI boom, even if falling short of or manifesting in ways far different from what advocates claim could be absolutely profound.
There are a couple of items I've been sitting on for a few years which might make interesting HN submissions. One is a Wikipedia list of defunct US automobile companies. There are a lot of them:
Another, which I cannot locate presently, was a list of hundreds of oil companies which had been registered in California.
In both cases:
- A huge number of individual enterprises sprang up.
- A tiny minority of those survived. The rest were acquired or simply went out of business.
- The resulting industries transformed absolutely everything, though not necessarily how early pioneers and backers advertised or anticipated.
The most salient observation though is that these are events from which one can draw a profound boundary, with clear "before" and "after" times. Moreover, the concerns of those in the midst of the transformation often seem quaint because we live in the world shaped by that transition. Thinking from the perspective of those alive at the time, or before, their world DID in fact end.
I'm reasonably certain of a few things:
- AI seems like it will profoundly disrupt much of the present high-tech information technology sector. Particularly programming, data processing, data creation, data interpretation, design, and other elements.
- There will be tremendous business failures. The end result will likely be profoundly monopolistic, with a very few large winners. To the extent that diversity is retained, it's likely to be grounded in legal, cultural, financial, and/or regulatory conditions, and not on the "free market" preserving competition. (The free market rarely preserves competition.)
- There will be many unanticipated, and some anticipated, negative consequences. Growing lack of trustworthiness of information and media, use in mass propaganda and targeted manipulation, general disinformation, etc., are among the more obvious of these (and generally: are anticipated). These are only some of the consequences.
- There will likely be sharp limitations or constraints on certain applications, again, some fairly evident, others not, but which will shape the resulting landscape.
I find the bubble / no-bubble question something of a red herring. Both hugely transformational and stillborne technologies tend to arrive with bubbles. Markets and investment patterns tend to drive this. What really matters is how well the technology ultimately persists after the bodies have fallen.
I'm both highly critical of much of present-day Silicon Valley (as a metonym for the high-tech industry itself, not merely some geographical region centred near Sunnyvale, CA), and of the view that developments of the current AI boom, even if falling short of or manifesting in ways far different from what advocates claim could be absolutely profound.
There are a couple of items I've been sitting on for a few years which might make interesting HN submissions. One is a Wikipedia list of defunct US automobile companies. There are a lot of them:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_automobile_man...>
Another, which I cannot locate presently, was a list of hundreds of oil companies which had been registered in California.
In both cases:
- A huge number of individual enterprises sprang up.
- A tiny minority of those survived. The rest were acquired or simply went out of business.
- The resulting industries transformed absolutely everything, though not necessarily how early pioneers and backers advertised or anticipated.
The most salient observation though is that these are events from which one can draw a profound boundary, with clear "before" and "after" times. Moreover, the concerns of those in the midst of the transformation often seem quaint because we live in the world shaped by that transition. Thinking from the perspective of those alive at the time, or before, their world DID in fact end.
I'm reasonably certain of a few things:
- AI seems like it will profoundly disrupt much of the present high-tech information technology sector. Particularly programming, data processing, data creation, data interpretation, design, and other elements.
- There will be tremendous business failures. The end result will likely be profoundly monopolistic, with a very few large winners. To the extent that diversity is retained, it's likely to be grounded in legal, cultural, financial, and/or regulatory conditions, and not on the "free market" preserving competition. (The free market rarely preserves competition.)
- There will be many unanticipated, and some anticipated, negative consequences. Growing lack of trustworthiness of information and media, use in mass propaganda and targeted manipulation, general disinformation, etc., are among the more obvious of these (and generally: are anticipated). These are only some of the consequences.
- There will likely be sharp limitations or constraints on certain applications, again, some fairly evident, others not, but which will shape the resulting landscape.
I find the bubble / no-bubble question something of a red herring. Both hugely transformational and stillborne technologies tend to arrive with bubbles. Markets and investment patterns tend to drive this. What really matters is how well the technology ultimately persists after the bodies have fallen.