The dotcom bubble was the whole investor industry trying to capitalize on the internet, and they just failed because they were investing everything in a new thing people didn’t need yet.
Today we live in an interconnected world, close to what was promised to the investors back then.
In ten, twenty years, once the bubble, OpenAI, Anthropic and all that are long buried, in what form do you think AI will exist? Do you think it will be an improved version of our current-day LLMs, or a different form of AI? Or do you imagine something else altogether?
The outlook is grim. AI “leaders” have already started talking about slowing down development to ensure proper guardrails are in place to prevent catastrophe. If you take it at face value that means frontier models are vastly more dangerous than we thought if the move-fast-and-break-stuff crowd is advising caution. On the other hand there is a dire gap in what has been promised by these folks and what AI is able to deliver. I believe currently the number is something like $10,000 invested for $1 in profits. That kind of gap is unsustainable so the “slow down it’s too dangerous” message could be a cover for a difficult to monetize product so investors don’t crash the markets.
As to the future, it’s difficult to predict, but if we take current trends forward we’ll see a massive reduction in the overall usefulness of the internet. AI bots will eventually greatly outnumber human users on social media, AI generated content will be ubiquitous, and the algorithms will begin optimizing for AI material to the point that human created media will fall to the wayside.
The impact on society will be profound and immeasurable. We’re already seeing a shift in how algorithms are controlling information. They are surpressing resistance movements, atrocities, and any stories that threaten the status quo. Moving into the future that stuff will be burried under AI generated content that is indistinguishable from reality. Political movements will be entirely fabricated from whole cloth while real ones become impossible to find. Fakes of politicians and leaders making speaches they would never give or moments that never happened will flood the zone and drown out any real information.
What’s of most concern is that the ecosystem of the internet is almost entirely controlled by colonial capitalists and their fascist cronies so they will be the ones setting the tone and direction.