All of us are waiting for the bubble to burst but will it actually affect anything? I think AI has already done so much irreversible damage to Interest & Society(Kinda). I have seen YouTube channels with 100K subs who create AI Slops(Music, Short stupid essay), Xhitter account which have more than 100K followers which pump out good enough art. Even if bubbles burst these tools will go nowhere. Every day I wake up I feel much shittier. I need to puke. I am seeing everything I love getting ruined by soulless bot or greedy humans who don't love art/music/story etc. I am sounding like a boomer but I am in my early 20s actually. I go to reddit there are Pro AI people laughing at us calling us Luddite or "Decel". I have no hope most of you guys are old folk. I want to leave this fast paced world & go do farming at my hometown. Reading Books made by humans and watching some movies made by humans in a week without caring about this whole hellhole. I was so passionate about computer engineering I really loved technology. I was one of the early adopters of Gen AI who loved Midjounery because it was new & looked kinda magical to me now it looks like the most dystopian shit human yet created. I now resent my degree. I am a replaceable human who has no value. Human evolutioned much just to be replaced by some bots so I can do more slavery for corpo lords who believe that capital is ever growing like a cancer cell.
First, I'd like to talk about what we all hope will be the results of the burst bubble.
I think first and foremost we want to believe that when this bubble bursts (the sooner the better) the slop train will derail and the companies pushing it will be wounded if not outright die from the catastrophic shock to their bottom line.
I think we also hope that things will go back to a semblance of what they were before. Nobody should really be blind to the fact that there was a lot of slop on social media before the advent of Generative AI. Bots were still becoming more and more prevalent (mostly for the purposes of selling things or scamming people). Algorithms were still addictive and data privacy was in the toilet with data brokerage firms siphoning up anything they could to make money off users.
There are two problems. The first is the AI exacerbated a lot of problems that were already prevalent and making the internet and the world worse. Those problems aren't going to go away or be fixed just because the bubble bursts.
But the main problem is that our economy (at least in the US) is currently being carried on the back of two main Industries. One is the new AI industry and that has usurped the economic power of the people (who buy goods and services). The other is the military industrial complex and AI is trying really hard right now to sink it's teeth deep into that honey pot because it has something you and I plebian consumers don't have. That's where the money is.
So when the bubble bursts we'll still have the enshittied internet bearing down on us, and we'll have an economy in shambles.
I think we all hope prices will come down for things we want to consume. Electronics, media etc. But that's unlikely. We know that it won't happen because in recent history this has happened before. The price of everything increases with the shortages in 2020 and the following years of the pandemic. Those prices haven't lowered significantly since then. Companies are fighting tooth and nail to keep them high because the line must go up.
Now for what you can do.
Invest in a safe commodity. Gold, silver, European bonds, that kind of thing. (I know this is not possible for most people).
Remove as much AI slop and other nonsense from your life. Don't consume it. Don't interact with it. Encourage other people to do the same.
If you have to interact with AI (for work or school or whatever), do it to the max. Do not pay for the privilege. Make it as costly for the company providing the AI as humanly possible.
Choose to spend your money at places (if you can) that you want to see survive the crash. Local places you like going to. Businesses you want to support. Use your word of mouth to suggest them to others.
You say you're into technology and engineering. Keep learning. Keep your skills sharp. Don't let AI rob you of your ability to reason and think and problem solve. The AI is nothing without us. It produces nothing without us. It innovates nothing without us. It can't exist without us. That's why these companies are pushing it so hard in so many products regardless of whether it's useful or not. They need us to keep producing content. They need us to keep innovating and creating.
I know that it's not easy to see the end of this as anything but a crashoot.
I know it's hard to prepare for the worst while keeping your mental health protected.
I know the feeling of being so hopeful for the new technologies of the world only to have that hope and excitement thrown back in your face while tech bros try to replace you at every turn.
But you aren't just a replaceable cog. They keep trying to massage and coerce and recruit people like us to use their crap because we're important. If we weren't they wouldn't try.
You have skills. You have training. You have enough common sense to be able to look around you and see the problems. That will always be valuable. Even though they're trying to downplay that value at every turn because they are greedy fucks who just want to scoop money into their own coffers.
Don't give up.