Well, it seems the AI bubble’s nearing its end - the Financial Times has reported a recent dive in tech stocks, the mass media has fully soured on AI, and there’s murmurs that the hucksters are pivoting to quantum.
By my guess, this quantum bubble is going to fail to get off the ground - as I see it, the AI bubble has heavily crippled the tech industry’s ability to create or sustain new bubbles, for two main reasons.
No Social License
For the 2000s and much of the 2010s, tech enjoyed a robust social license to operate - even if they weren’t loved per se (e.g. Apple), they were still pretty widely accepted throughout society, and resistance to them was pretty much nonexistent.
Whilst it was starting to fall apart with the “techlash” of the 2020s, the AI bubble has taken what social license tech has had left and put it through the shredder.
Environmental catastrophe, art theft and plagiarism, destruction of livelihoods and corporate abuse, misinformation and enabling fascism, all of this (and so much more) has eviscerated acceptance of the tech industry as it currently stands, inspiring widespread resistance and revulsion against AI, and the tech industry at large.
For the quantum bubble, I expect it will face similar resistance/mockery right out of the gate, with the wider public refusing to entertain whatever spurious claims the hucksters make, and fighting any attempts by the hucksters to force quantum into their lives.
(For a more specific prediction, quantum’s alleged encryption-breaking abilities will likely inspire backlash, being taken as evidence the hucksters are fighting against Internet privacy.)
No Hypergrowth Markets
As Baldur Bjarnason has noted about tech industry valuations:
“Over the past few decades, tech companies have been priced based on their unprecedented massive year-on-year growth that has kept relatively steady through crises and bubble pops. As the thinking goes, if you have two companies—one tech, one not—with the same earnings, the tech company should have a higher value because its earnings are likely to grow faster than the not-tech company. In a regular year, the growth has been much faster.”
For a while, this has held - even as the hypergrowth markets dried up and tech rapidly enshittified near the end of the ‘10s, the gravy train has managed to keep rolling for tech.
That gravy train is set to slam right into a brick wall, however - between the obscenely high costs of both building and running LLMs (both upfront and ongoing), and the virtually nonexistent revenues those LLMs have provided (except for NVidia, who has made a killing in the shovel selling business), the AI bubble has burned billions upon billions of dollars on a product which is practically incapable of making a profit, and heavily embrittled the entire economy in the process.
Once the bubble finally bursts, it’ll gut the wider economy and much of the tech industry, savaging evaluations across the board and killing off tech’s hypergrowth story in the process.
For the quantum bubble, this will significantly complicate attempts to raise investor/venture capital, as the finance industry comes to view tech not as an easy and endless source of growth, but as either a mature, stable industry which won’t provide the runaway returns they’re looking for, or as an absolute money pit of an industry, one trapped deep in a malaise era and capable only of wiping out whatever money you put into it.
(As a quick addendum, it's my 25th birthday tomorrow - I finished this over the course of four hours and planned to release it tomorrow, but decided to post it tonight.)
Found a fun sneer at AI anthromoporphisation in the arXiv: If LLMs Have Human-Like Attributes, Then So Does Age of Empires II