I am not the smartest guy in the world. But I do believe in natural laws and first principles. They kind of almost never fail (to impress).
The world of AI is booming/ hyping. Whatever. There’s this whole world that believes human intelligence is going to suffer and AI will take over. Ok. That’s what people are calling the future.
The saints have taught us – live in the present. Let’s try it for once.
The kind of capex investment going into AI and the kind of returns being generated is not sustainable in anyway. Okay, I don’t own a datacenter and I am not Nvidia or AMD or a Musk or an Altman. But as I am a first principles guy.
The only thing I see going up are electricity bills in the near future. Unless someone cracks the code to sustained solar energy and then the world conversations shifts to solar and climate change again.
There are stories of comparing this AI moment to the railroad moment. Railroads were a key necessity. May be I am missing something out. May be making humans more insanely efficient is also a key necessity.
But then a safe assumption to make is: most people are leveraging AI in the most ‘dumb’ manner possible. To create content on social media. To write E-mails.
I teach a course on applied AI and I tell my learners – folks, AI will only amplify who you are. So if you are intrinsically dumb, it will amplify that. If you are a critial thinker and strong at reasoning, it will amplify that.
Why do I teach a course on AI when I am talking of the AI bubble? Ummm, I remember someone saying ‘in a Gold rush sell shovels’. I keep it honest. May be some of my learners will actually change their life or write the world future. But then anything can happen ‘may be’.
I do appreciate the noise around agents and agentic ai. But apart from the buzzzz, I don’t see the bizzzz !
May be I am not yet plugged into the AI matrix, but I see billions of dollars being spent on training machines to be smarter only to be used by someone a lot more dumber?
This smart – dumb partnership is what makes me sound the bubble. Unless the user evolves to be way smarter than he/ she is today, AI will only be as useful. Or may be one day it will outsmart us all and rule the world.
MONEY
Whatever it be. Some people will make boatloads of money either selling shovels or investing in AI infrastructure companies. There’s a lot of life changing money at stake here.
Look, AI, even if its a bubble, it will take another couple of years for the signal to come through the noise. And that’s when some people will emerge and most will see yet another hype world changing future shaping cycle.
Now as I said, I may not be the most intelligent human. I might not have seen the cycles really closely. And I certainly haven’t made insane sums of money investing in any of these hype cycles. Infact I am selling shovels for the very first time.
But I do see with clarity a new form of intelligence being leveraged by a large number of low intelligence beings. And if for some reason this is how AI gets trained, overall it will turn out to be the world’s worst hoch poch noodles.
Remember folks, natural laws and first principles. Stick to them.
Shunya AI 