Trickster godling. I'm a 36 year old nb asexual (she/they for convenience) living in Lisbon, Portugal. I like thunderstorms. Transhumanist/Aspiring Immortal. Rationalist. Antifa. Cosplayer. Tremere with some Ravnos and Brujah. Follower of Azura and Hermaeus Mora. Current fandoms: Wheel of Time show, The Expanse, Starfield
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Like you, I'm sick to the back teeth of talking about AI. Like you, I keep getting dragged into discussions of AI. Unlike you‡, I spent the summer writing a book about why I'm sick of writing about AI⹋, which Farrar, Straus and Giroux will publish in 2026.
‡probably
âą‹"The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI"
A week ago, I turned that book into a speech, which I delivered as the annual Nordlander Memorial Lecture at Cornell, where I'm an AD White Professor-at-Large. This was my first-ever speech about AI and I wasn't sure how it would go over, but thankfully, it went great and sparked a lively Q&A. One of those questions came from a young man who said something like "So, you're saying a third of the stock market is tied up in seven AI companies that have no way to become profitable and that this is a bubble that's going to burst and take the whole economy with it?"
I said, "Yes, that's right."
He said, "OK, but what can we do about that?"
So I re-iterated the book's thesis: that the AI bubble is driven by monopolists who've conquered their markets and have no more growth potential, who are desperate to convince investors that they can continue to grow by moving into some other sector, e.g. "pivot to video," crypto, blockchain, NFTs, AI, and now "super-intelligence." Further: the topline growth that AI companies are selling comes from replacing most workers with AI, and re-tasking the surviving workers as AI babysitters ("humans in the loop"), which won't work. Finally: AI cannot do your job, but an AI salesman can 100% convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can't do your job, and when the bubble bursts, the money-hemorrhaging "foundation models" will be shut off and we'll lose the AI that can't do your job, and you will be long gone, retrained or retired or "discouraged" and out of the labor market, and no one will do your job. AI is the asbestos we are shoveling into the walls of our society and our descendants will be digging it out for generations:
The only thing (I said) that we can do about this is to puncture the AI bubble as soon as possible, to halt this before it progresses any further and to head off the accumulation of social and economic debt. To do that, we have to take aim at the material basis for the AI bubble (creating a growth story by claiming that defective AI can do your job).
"OK," the young man said, "but what can we do about the crash?" He was clearly very worried.
"I don't think there's anything we can do about that. I think it's already locked in. I mean, maybe if we had a different government, they'd fund a jobs guarantee to pull us out of it, but I don't think Trump'll do that, so –"
"But what can we do?"
We went through a few rounds of this, with this poor kid just repeating the same question in different tones of voice, like an acting coach demonstrating the five stages of grieving using nothing but inflection. It was an uncomfortable moment, and there was some decidedly nervous chuckling around the room as we pondered the coming AI (economic) apocalypse, and the fate of this kid graduating with mid-six-figure debts into an economy of ashes and rubble.
I firmly believe the (economic) AI apocalypse is coming. These companies are not profitable. They can't be profitable. They keep the lights on by soaking up hundreds of billions of dollars in other people's money and then lighting it on fire. Eventually those other people are going to want to see a return on their investment, and when they don't get it, they will halt the flow of billions of dollars. Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops.
This isn't like the early days of the web, or Amazon, or any of those other big winners that lost money before becoming profitable. Those were all propositions with excellent "unit economics" – they got cheaper with every successive technological generation, and the more customers they added, the more profitable they became. AI companies have – in the memorable phraseology of Ed Zitron – "dogshit unit-economics." Each generation of AI has been vastly more expensive than the previous one, and each new AI customer makes the AI companies lose more money:
This week, no less than the Wall Street Journal published a lengthy, well-reported story (by Eliot Brown and Robbie Whelan) on the catastrophic finances of AI companies:
The WSJ writers compare the AI bubble to other bubbles, like Worldcom's fraud-soaked fiber optic bonanza (which saw the company's CEO sent to prison, where he eventually died), and conclude that the AI bubble is vastly larger than any other bubble in recent history.
The data-center buildout has genuinely absurd finances – there are data-center companies that are collateralizing their loans by staking their giant Nvidia GPUs as collateral. This is wild: there's pretty much nothing (apart from fresh-caught fish) that loses its value faster than silicon chips. That goes triple for GPUs used in AI data-centers, where it's normal for tens of thousands of chips to burn out over a single, 54-day training run:
That barely scratches the surface of the funny accounting in the AI bubble. Microsoft "invests" in Openai by giving the company free access to its servers. Openai reports this as a ten billion dollar investment, then redeems these "tokens" at Microsoft's data-centers. Microsoft then books this as ten billion in revenue.
That's par for the course in AI, where it's normal for Nvidia to "invest" tens of billions in a data-center company, which then spends that investment buying Nvidia chips. The the same chunk of money being energetically passed back and forth between these closely related companies, all of which claim it as investment, as an asset, or as revenue (or all three).
The Journal quotes David Cahn, a VC from Sequoia, who says that for AI companies to become profitable, they would have to sell us $800 billion worth of services over the life of today's data centers and GPUs. Not only is that a very large number – it's also a very short time. AI bosses themselves will tell you that these data centers and GPUs will be obsolete practically from the moment they start operating. Mark Zuckerberg says he's prepared to waste "a couple hundred billion dollars" on misspent AI investments:
Bain & Co says that the only way to make today's AI investments profitable is for the sector to bring in $2 trillion by 2030 (the Journal notes that this is more than the combined revenue of Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple Nvidia and Meta):
How much money is the AI industry making? Morgan Stanley says it's $45b/year. But that $45b is based on the AI industry's own exceedingly cooked books, where annual revenue is actually annualized revenue, an accounting scam whereby a company chooses its best single revenue month and multiplies it by 12, even if that month is a wild outlier:
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-haters-gui/
Industry darlings like Coreweave (a middleman that rents out data-centers) are sitting on massive piles of debt, secured by short-term deals with tech companies that run out long before the debts can be repaid. If they can't find a bunch of new clients in a couple short years, they will default and collapse.
Today's AI bubble has absorbed more of the country's wealth and represents more of its economic activity than historic nation-shattering bubbles, like the 19th century UK rail bubble. A much-discussed MIT paper found that 95% of companies that had tried AI had either nothing to show for it, or experienced a loss:
Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops. Trump might bail out the AI companies, but for how long? They are incinerating money faster than practically any other human endeavor in history, with precious little to show for it.
During my stay at Cornell, one of the people responsible for the university's AI strategy asked me what I thought the university should be doing about AI. I told them that they should be planning to absorb the productive residue that will be left behind after the bubble bursts:
Plan for a future where you can buy GPUs for ten cents on the dollar, where there's a buyer's market for hiring skilled applied statisticians, and where there's a ton of extremely promising open source models that have barely been optimized and have vast potential for improvement.
There's plenty of useful things you can do with AI. But AI is (as Princeton's Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor, authors of AI Snake Oil put it), a normal technology:
That doesn't mean "nothing to see here, move on." It means that AI isn't the bow-wave of "impending superintelligence." Nor is it going to deliver "humanlike intelligence."
It's a grab-bag of useful (sometimes very useful) tools that can sometimes make workers' lives better, when workers get to decide how and when they're used.
The most important thing about AI isn't its technical capabilities or limitations. The most important thing is the investor story and the ensuing mania that has teed up an economical catastrophe that will harm hundreds of millions or even billions of people. AI isn't going to wake up, become superintelligent and turn you into paperclips – but rich people with AI investor psychosis are almost certainly going to make you much, much poorer.
Lord of the rings from Saurons perspective is a fucking fever dream because he started by reforming his essence into some physical form in mirkwood and before he even has enough strength to feel that the ring was even in the same forest as him he gets chased off by a group of wizards and elves looking to fuck some shit up. There goes his plan to get a dragon on his side
So he holds up in mordor gathering a new army, and only after about a century is he strong enough to do cool magic shit again, by that time however the ring hadnt been used in decades so there were no whispers of it except oops we found this weird little fucker who keeps yelling about his fucking precious, better go check out “shire baggins” whatever the fuck that is
So he finds out a fucking hobbit has his ring which in middle earth terms is like finding out mr magoo has your fucking nuclear launch codes. So he starts sending wave after wave of his own men to get the ring and they keep failing cause this fucking hobbit has friends. He has his homie saruman send some uruk-hai to get them and then sends some goblins to make sure everything goes right but for no apparent reason they stop reporting in, (something about horses and trees?) so he sends a guy to ask saruman straight out wheres my fucking ring and saruman straight up lies about it. Next thing he hears saruman has launched an all our invasion of rohan with 10000 uruk-hai so rip the bronies right? Nope the next day his army is defeated and saruman has fucking vanished.
Confused as fuck now sauron gets a fucking phone call from a god damn hobbit (ITS YOU!) but all he gets out of the little sovereign citizen is some shit about “i do not answer questions” and next thing he hears the hobbit has gone to fucking gondor. Alright send fucking everything we got, take gondor do whatever it takes get my fucking ring back. And what does he have to worry about right? After all even if rohan helps he’ll still win. Wtf is that an army of ghosts???!?!?!?
So then hes sitting there with his diminished army trying to figure out his next plan of attack and he gets another fucking phone call from the god damn great grandson of the prick who cut off his ring in the first place. “Oi cunt i got ur ring and im gonna fuc u up m8!” *click*
Goody he thinks, this arrogant sob is gonna bring my ring right to me, time to throw everything i got at this bastard. So then the fight starts hes super excited cause hes clearly winning and OH DEAR GOD MY RING IS IN THE VOLCANO HOW THE FU- *dies*
Now hes a weird ghost thing that cant ever do anything but lament how big a prick he is
“But I wanna know!” You’re gonna have to learn to be ok with not knowing some things, especially when those things involve personal details about strangers that they’re not comfortable sharing.
“But it’s confusing!” If you take the time to educate yourself it’ll no longer be confusing. Otherwise you’re just gonna have to learn to be ok with being confused.
“But it’s weird!” You probably do weird things all the time. Everyone does weird things sometimes. Life goes on.
“But it scares me!” Is it hurting you? No? You’ll be fine. Being scared and being harmed are not always the same thing. Learn to tell the difference and then act accordingly.
“But I want it!” And I want a million dollars. You can’t always get what you want.
A lot of people were also never told “no” as children and the consequences of that manifest in similar ways. Learn to be ok with being told “no.” You’re not gonna die if you don’t get your way in every single situation ever.
This is - legitimately - my favourite delivery of Shakespeare I have EVER seen (and I have seen some good-ass productions yo, in the Globe Theatre itself even). Like seriously, even though the words are unchanged, he’s stripped away ALL of the archaic pretense and assumed grandeur of ~presenting the bard~ that makes even the most wildly talented of actors and innovative of productions inherently inaccessible to a modern audience. Like, they’re still great, they can still communicate the message and (some) of the nuance, but they’re still always a step removed from being identifiable to any viewer’s lived experience. They’re still always reciting 15th century poetry. But this guy? This guy is like, screw iambic pentameter, to hell with being precious about the material, HOW WOULD AN ACTUAL PERSON SAY THIS SHIT?
Like this. And it’s beautiful. It’s beautiful to hear a soliloquy I loved so much already, and have it come to life in a way it never, ever, did before. I feel like I grasp his motivations, his twists and turns, no longer on an academic level but on a visceral, instinctive one. Because he’s presenting his mental and emotional journey in a way that speaks honestly, like a real person.
So yeah, this shit post? I love it. Deeply and sincerely.
Describing Terry Pratchett’s books is difficult. Someone asked me what the book I was reading was about, and I had to tell them it was about banking and the gold standard, but like in a cool way with golems and action.Â
It is so, so difficult to explain to people that your favorite book is about transgender feminist dwarves, Nazi werewolves, and the mystery of a missing piece of really old ritual bread. And Opera saves the day.
The bureaucrats of the universe get annoyed at the paperwork humanity causes so they decide to steal Christmas. Replacement Christmas is done by Death and replacement Death is done by goth Mary Poppins, who is also in charge of the investigation.
An entire clan of tattooed, hairy, kleptomaniac, alcoholic Scotsmen decide a little girl is their new best friend whether she wants to be or not and she rescues her absolutely worthless brother by discovering the power of selfishness.
The universes burocrats want to measure everything so they pay a man to imprison time so everything will stop and they can measure things in peace. Goth mary Poppins saves the day, the fifth horseman of the apocalypse is the best Milkman in the world, and chocolate saves the day. Also someone was born twice.
Classic dynastic machinations are happening in fantasy China, to be completely overturned by a gang of elderly barbarian heroes and the world’s worst wizard and best sprinter
Phantom of the Opera au, except there’s witches, a cookbook that is thinly-veiled pornography, and Christine is played by a fledgeling witch with multiple personalities who can’t stop being sensible long enough to enjoy herself
Atlantis provides an excuse for a xenophobia-inspired war between Britain and the Middle East but it’s fine because the armies are arrested for conspiracy to cause public nuisance.
the pied piper is a racket being run by some talking mice and a cat but they accidentally invent socialism. then of course there are also the rat horrors
And while the aforementioned terrible wizard is having an awful time in Fantasy Australia, his colleagues try to find him and accidentally invent sex and the platypus along the way.
Have you ever wondered about the poor people whose sole role in the narrative is to rush into the room when summoned and be slaughtered by the hero? THIS is their story. Also, it’s a million to one chance that they hit the voonerables.
I don't think people understand the degree to which society is kept alive by the labor of the least well-regarded professions. If sewage technicians and sanitation workers and their expertise and knowledge were to disappear tomorrow, the streets would pile high with bodies in every city. We live in a world where we get to be blessedly ignorant to just how fast, how brutally and how violently cholera can rip through a community. How many babies it can kill. How many elderly bodies it can devour alive. You've never seen what it's like when typhoid takes root.
"Oh but we have modern medicine" if you don't have clean drinking water and a way to dispose of your piss and shit and trash you are going to fucking die. No if or but or maybe, you are dead, and so are half the people you know.
To me the most fun part about fix-its is placing dominoes.
Tragedies often consist of escalating series of actions and circumstances which, in isolation, were not clearly leading to the tragic end but form a chain of cause-and-effect directly towards it in hindsight. In equal but opposite fashion, I love starting with small inoccuous changes to canon that in themselves do not obviously fix everything but start a new chain that leads to a better ending.
It's kind of impossible for fix-its to feel fully natural– the reader by definition knows what the original ending was and that this ending will be happier because the writer wants it to be– but it is possible for them to not feel contrived. A big deus-ex-machina, or a character breaking with their pre-established tragic flaws to suddenly make all the "correct" decisions almost always feels unsatisfying to me.
But a few carefully placed small domino pieces slowly knocking over bigger and bigger tiles until the entire story has radically changed? That's a lot more fun.
It recquires the author to both correctly identify the original chain of cause-and-effect and understand the characters well enough to know how they'd react to different circumstances. Because if the story feels like it's fixing the wrong problem or the characters don't act like themselves the magic is lost. But when it works? When it clicks and the reader sees the domino chain laid out in front of them? It's beautiful.
