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AI Will Destroy Everything

But not in the way you think it will.

If you take the tech bros seriously, we will all be suffering in a Terminator-esque AI dystopia in just a few years because their AI models will be so damn good. And why shouldn’t we believe them? It isn’t like they have a huge vested interest in AI being perceived as an existential threat… Meanwhile, back in the real world, AI poses a gargantuan threat to us all; it’s just more like 2008 and 1933 rather than some big Hollywood production. You see, AI critics like myself have been comparing the AI bubble to the infamous dot-com bubble of the late ’90s, but we have been sorely wrong. It is far, far worse. The dot-com crash will seem like a picnic in the park in comparison to what is to come.

There is a good chance that many of you reading this weren’t even born when the dot-com bubble happened (my god, am I old!), so let’s quickly recap.

The dot-com bubble occurred in the late 1990s because e-commerce suddenly became viable. Vast swathes of the population had a personal computer and a slow dial-up internet connection (which involved accessing the internet via landline phone cables). At the time, capital was cheap too. So investors piled money into internet businesses, hoping to scoop up large portions of the market, as well as building infrastructure, such as much faster fibre optic…