I've been hit by inspiration whilst dicking about on Discord - felt like making some off-the-cuff predictions on what will happen once the AI bubble bursts. (Mainly because I had a bee in my bonnet that was refusing to fuck off.)
- A Full-Blown Tech Crash
Its no secret the industry's put all their chips into AI - basically every public company's chasing it to inflate their stock prices, NVidia's making money hand-over-fist playing gold rush shovel seller, and every exec's been hyping it like its gonna change the course of humanity.
Additionally, going by Baldur Bjarnason, tech's chief goal with this bubble is to prop up the notion of endless growth so it can continue reaping the benefits for just a bit longer.
If and when the tech bubble pops, I expect a full-blown crash in the tech industry (much like Ed Zitron's predicting), with revenues and stock prices going through the floor and layoffs left and right. Additionally, I'm expecting those stock prices will likely take a while to recover, if ever, as tech likely comes to be viewed either as a stable, mature industry that's no longer experiencing nonstop growth or as an industry experiencing a full-blown malaise era, with valuations and stock prices getting savaged as Wall Street comes to see tech companies as high risk investments at best and money pits at worst. (Missed this incomplete sentence several times)
Chance: Near-Guaranteed. I'm pretty much certain on this, and expect it to happen sometime this year.
- A Decline in Tech/STEM Students/Graduates
Extrapolating a bit from Prediction 1, I suspect we might see a lot less people going into tech/STEM degrees if tech crashes like I expect.
The main thing which drew so many people to those degrees, at least from what I could see, was the notion that they'd make you a lotta money - if tech publicly crashes and burns like I expect, it'd blow a major hole in that notion.
Even if it doesn't kill the notion entirely, I can see a fair number of students jumping ship at the sight of that notion being shaken.
Chance: Low/Moderate. I've got no solid evidence this prediction's gonna come true, just a gut feeling. Epistemically speaking, I'm firing blind.
- Tech/STEM's Public Image Changes - For The Worse
The AI bubble's given us a pretty hefty amount of mockery-worthy shit - Mira Murati shitting on the artists OpenAI screwed over, Andrej Karpathy shitting on every movie made pre-'95, Sam Altman claiming AI will soon solve all of physics, Luma Labs publicly embarassing themselves, ProperPrompter recreating motion capture, But Worse^tm, Mustafa Suleyman treating everything on the 'Net as his to steal, et cetera, et cetera, et fucking cetera.
All the while, AI has been flooding the Internet with unholy slop, ruining Google search, cooking the planet, stealing everyone's work (sometimes literally) in broad daylight, supercharging scams, killing livelihoods, exploiting the Global South and God-knows-what-the-fuck-else.
All of this has been a near-direct consequence of the development of large language models and generative AI.
Baldur Bjarnason has already mentioned AI being treated as a major red flag by many - a "tech asshole" signifier to be more specific - and the massive disconnect in sentiment tech has from the rest of the public. I suspect that "tech asshole" stench is gonna spread much quicker than he thinks.
Chance: Moderate/High. This one's also based on a gut feeling, but with the stuff I've witnessed, I'm feeling much more confident with this than Prediction 2. Arguably, if the cultural rehabilitation of the Luddites is any indication, it might already be happening without my knowledge.
If you've got any other predictions, or want to put up some criticisms of mine, go ahead and comment.
Thinking about it, that's probably gonna have some long-lasting aftereffects - I'm not sure exactly what shape those aftereffects will take, but I imagine they're gonna be quite major.