Every generation gets the crisis it deserves, and ours appears to be arriving with unusual courtesy: it has been advertising itself for months. The signs sit in plain view, in the valuation ratios of the American stock market, in the borrowing figures of the United States government, and in the breathless press releases of companies that have discovered the most reliable way to lift a share price is to attach the letters “AI” to almost anything.
Start with the obvious bubble, the one everyone can see even if they would rather not. Artificial intelligence is real technology with real uses. That is not in dispute. What is in dispute is whether the hundreds of billions of dollars being poured into data centres, chips, and large language models will generate returns anywhere close to justifying their cost.Â
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