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   Anthony (abucci@buc.ci)'s status on Sunday, 14-Jul-2024 02:56:35 JST Anthony
   Regarding that last boost from @inthehands@hachyderm.io ( https://hachyderm.io/@inthehands/112777125024725589 ):
   
   I've been consulting on and off in the tech sector since 2013 or so, and did occasional consulting projects as far back as 1995 when I freelanced as a web developer (!). For as long as I've been doing this, there have been people, many people, who thought they could create a piece of technology that would exponentially increase the speed of a process that was bound by some physical constraint and could not increase at that rate. I've commented on this phenomenon a few times before, for instance here: https://buc.ci/abucci/p/1705675509.136902 . Many times I've started a project, come to the conclusion that it could not achieve the desired goal with a piece of technology, and told the person this. Generally speaking people don't want to hear this.
   
   It's a pernicious ideology, this belief that exponential growth is always just one discovery away.
   
   I think #GenerativeAI and the current hype cycle is this phenomenon writ large. This pattern of reality-denying irrationality may have taken hold across a large segment of the economy, in other words. Furthermore, if this analysis is to be believed then the irrationality has turned into anticipation that is now reflected in artificially-high stock prices. One way to think of a company's stock price is as a reflection of anticipation about the company's future earnings. If investors believe companies will become remarkably more productive, and therefore more profitable, because of #AI, then the stock price is artificially high. I think it's probably more subtle than that, having to do with other factors such as how investors favor technology companies over companies that do or make stuff. The belief may also be that companies will shift away from doing or making stuff towards becoming more technology oriented. Such a shift would not necessarily be reflected in profits, but instead might manifest in layoffs and other shifts in personnel makeup, which we're also seeing.
   
   Either way, it's an illusion because of the pesky uncooperative nature of physical reality. I don't know if there's a crash coming--though it seems there may be--but I do think it's likely the nature of (large) companies might change significantly in a bad way. Think GE turning into a globe-spanning financial company under Jack Welch ("The Man Who Broke Capitalism") and then mostly imploding ( https://www.investopedia.com/insights/rise-and-fall-ge/ ). Sam Altman idolizes Welch, and tech companies have resurrected some of Welch's worst practices like stack ranked layoffs.