What Remains
After the railroad manias, the tracks remained. The reckoning will not erase AI.
The morning after a bubble is not the end of the world.
It only feels that way to the people who mistook the bubble for the world.
After the railroad manias, the tracks remained. After the dot-com crash, the internet remained. After the fiber overbuild, the cables remained. After solar bankruptcies, the panels kept improving. After every great technological overreach, something survives the wreckage because the original impulse was not entirely false.
“The end of the fantasy is not the end of the technology.”
That is how it will be with artificial intelligence.
It will strip away the religious language, the lazy extrapolations, the benchmark theater, the infinite-scaling assumptions, the cheap claims of imminent replacement, the idea that every human act of cognition is merely a temporary inefficiency waiting to be automated.
What remains will be more modest than the mythology.
This is the paradox that every serious builder must understand. The end of the fantasy is not the end of the technology. It is the beginning of the discipline that allows the technology to become durable.
- [01]Perez, C. — “Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital”, Edward Elgar (2002) · www.e-elgar.com/shop/gbp/technological-revolutions-and-financial-capital-9781843763314.html
- [02]Janeway, W. — “Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy”, Cambridge University Press (2018 (2nd ed.)) · www.cambridge.org/core/books/doing-capitalism-in-the-innovation-economy/