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'Exactly how the dot-com bubble burst': A market research firm says keep an eye on this AI warning sign
(www.businessinsider.com)
this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2026
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Technology
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I wonder if there's a name for this fallacy...
Suggesting that something isn't true simply because a lot of people are saying it's true (with or without evidence, doesn't really matter). "I keep reading about this being a bubble, so that means it can't be true"
It's like the inverse (converse? I forget. It's been years since I took a logic course) of an appeal to the masses.
Regardless, it's fallacious reasoning.
You're not getting the full picture of the reasoning, or intentionally ignoring parts, I dunno.
Large groups of people are historically bad at predicting financial markets. Very few people ever correctly predict a bubble ending, and considering that a large group of people are traumatized by 2008 and can read Wikipedia well enough to see the Dot Com bubble, they've erroneously put 2 and 2 together and think all large investments in tech will equate to a bubble. Regardless of the structure underlying it.
Structural differences between Dot Com bubble and AI investments are numerous and extensive. Structurally, they're similar anecdotally at best. Yes, there are problematic parts. Data center demand will never be met by anything other than a few janky fly-by-night centers and ramshackle kludge-hosts in Serbia or Brazil where they're not regulated like the US or EU.
The circular investment issue isn't just actual cash trading hands, it's assets and stock as well. In previous bubbles the majority of the bad investments were over-leveraged financing. Loans. There's actually very little in terms of loans going into these companies, which is a notable difference between this and literally every other bubble in history.
I think the bubble will be 2 or 3 smaller bubbles that falter, but the mass of the overall industry will fail to full tip over because there's enough parts that can be scrapped and reapplied to other issues anyway, that demand won't ever evaporate as it did for $2 million URLs in the Dot Com bubble, or railway lines to nowhere in the 1840's.
This does not ignore or assume no problems from layoffs and job displacement. That's a very real and huge threat, and AI will only enhance this problem by trying to claim it can manipulate and bilk poor people better than Google can.