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Time Is Different

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There are at least three different kinds of bubble - though perhaps these are simply a matter of scale. Or width.

There's the soap bubble, that when it pops essentially disappears. These are surprisingly rare - I'd have to go look up Quibi, but most things hold on in some form.

There's the rubber balloon, that leaves a noticeable residue in just one or two places. Sometimes that residue is mostly harmful, sometimes it's an interesting and useful niche, but in any case, it's a niche. I think Smart Glasses might end up here, some day.

Finally, when some bubbles burst, they splatter everything in a pervasive way. The Internet - not on your list, though you may have heard of it - was absolutely a bubble for a few years. Prior to the late '90's, it was as niche as CB Radio. After the dot-com boom and bust, it was everywhere - not a corner of our world hasn't been altered to at least some degree by the Internet. Electricity, cars, and so on are all of this category. It might not last forever - the canal network didn't - but it'll have reasonably long term effects on the entire economy (which we're all part of whether we want to be or not).

It's early days in the AI bubble. But I think the smart money is on it being the latter kind of bubble. This doesn't mean that throwing money at AI is a sure thing - quite the opposite - but it does mean that there's a couple of things we can usefully be doing. First, understanding the technology's capabilities, which is hard to do because it's different every month. Second, trying to understand how this will affect the industry and the world at large when the bubble bursts. You can do this to make money investing in the right things, but you can also do this to understand how and where regulation, security, and so on will need to change.

I could very easily be wrong - maybe AI will retreat into a tiny niche where it's useful and most people won't ever be affected by its existence. But I suspect AI will end up as pervasive, with the technology having (often indirect) effects on large parts of our lives. And if this does occur, I'd rather have some preparation in advance.