from Hacker News

What's next after the AI bubble bursts?

by gfysfm on 3/8/25, 8:51 PM with 26 comments

• by 6stringmerc on 3/8/25, 9:28 PM

  Personally I see there being a whiplash effect in the US workforce where after the crash (stock market, egregious wealth gap, cost of living in food/medical basics) the nation will return to a “local minded” situation where jobs will become lower efficiency, higher headcount, akin to the CCC’s “make work” type programs. The efficiency of AI in replacing humans is evident in many menial tasks…but the consumer driven economy of the US is showing real signs of pending disaster. Unemployment isn’t low, the numbers are troubling when seen in real terms.

  To put it another way, cutting people who stopped looking as “not unemployed” is as ridiculous as excluding the price of milk or eggs from real inflation / COL metrics. The fudging of numbers simply cannot last forever.

  So while AI will absolutely be a boon in the short term, in the long run, and how it all come apart could be very disturbing circa 1793 France, the human element will rebound. Will we see self-checkout at grocery stores taken away for humans once again? Will there be work from home operators instead of AI call routing? It’s hard to imagine just what a collapse of the high point of human productivity (and general repression of lower economic classes through insurance and wage stagnation tracing back decades) but it is a cyclical historical framework.

  In short, whatever it is, it’s going to be pretty ugly and potentially break apart the US Federal structure because the rifts are beyond closing. AI is simply the gasoline on the fire. True fear and loathing my friends…

• by theyknowitsxmas on 3/8/25, 10:04 PM

  Spy telescopes that travel faster than light and watch you jerk it 20 years ago.

• by alchemist1e9 on 3/8/25, 9:17 PM

  I’m convinced the people who think there is an AI bubble are simply not using it.

  It is increasing my ability and productivity beyond belief and I see incredible potential.

  The author mentions they don’t think it is a bubble necessarily but that we will have lots of GPUs, however I seriously doubt anything other than more AI will be the result of lots of GPUs.

• by cyanydeez on 3/8/25, 9:56 PM

  Id have gone with "Singularity to sigmoid, whats next for AI"

• by Animats on 3/8/25, 9:33 PM

  There's certainly an AI valuation bubble. It's starting to look like AI isn't going to be expensive, and that everybody can do it. So the startups with a P/E ratio over 10-20 are going to get a haircut. That includes OpenAI and Tesla. Even if Tesla can get self-driving to work, that's still just part of the low-margin auto industry.

  There's Trump's "Stargate" consortium.[1] Don't want to go there.

  We will see more routine use of AI. But it's still not good enough to use where you can't offload the externality costs of errors onto someone else. Customer service being the classic example of where you can.

  There are probably two decades of wrenching change ahead as the world adjusts to a weaker US, a stronger Russia, and a much more dominant China. That may slow down civilian tech adoption.

  The next big growth area is probably low-cost killbots in high volume.

  [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/22/kelly-evans-what-on-earth-is...

• by sshine on 3/9/25, 7:34 AM

  After AI, the next boom will be robotics.