What could have been

The amount of interest to explore this opportunity is worth it. The bubble is worth it. I don't think it's lost years, and even if it is, the technology is compelling enough to make the gamble worth it.

The fatigue of reading the same shit over and over again makes people forget that it's only a couple years. It also makes people forget how ground breaking and paradigm shifting this technology was. People are complaining about how stupid LLMs are when possibly just 5 years back no one could even predict that that such levels of intelligence in machinese was even possible.

The amount of money that's been spent on AI related investments over the past 2-5 years really has been astonishing - like single digit percentage points of GDP astonishing.

I think it's clear to at there are productivity boosts to be had from applying this technology to fields like programming. If you completely disagree with that statement I have a hunch that nothing could convince you otherwise at this point.

But at what point could those productivity boosts offset the overall spend? (If we assume we don't get to some weird AGI that upturns all forms of economics.)

Two points of comparison. Open source has been credibly estimated to have provided over 8 trillion dollars of value to the global economy over the past few decades: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4693148 - could AI-assisted programming provide a similar boost over the next decade or so?

The buildout of railways in the 1800s took resources comparable to the AI buildout of the past few years and lost a lot of investors a lot of money, but are regarded as a huge economic boost despite those losses.

Every VC pitch is about some ground-breaking tech or unassailable moat that will be built around a massive SAM; in reality early traction is all about solving that annoying and stupid problem your customers hate doing but that you can do for them. The disconnect between the extraordinary pitch and the mundane shipped solution is the core of so much business.

That same disconnect also means that a lot of real and good problems will be solved with money that was meant for AGI but ends up developing other, good technology.

My biggest fear is that we are not investing in the basic, atoms-based tech that we need in the US to not be left behind in the cheap energy future: batteries, solar, and wind is being gutted right now due to chaotic government behavior, the actions of madmen that are incapable of understanding the economy today, much less where tech will take it in 5-10 years. We are also underinvesting in basics like housing, or construction tech. Hopefully some of the AI money goes to fixing those gaping holes in the country's capital allocation.