The Consequences of the AI Bubble

AI, over the past several years has gained fairly widespread adoption and its use has seen questions raised about the future with AI and what it may or may not end up being capable of. Some of these questions come from Sci-Fi movies and TV shows which for a long time has been warning us of the consequences of rise of intelligent machines and what might happen should machines suddenly get smart or behave in ways that are not in humanity's best interest.

So how close are we then to this future? Its likely we are quite far from this point, if we ever reach it at all. The reason for this, is that AI as its stands today isn't really intelligence in the same way we think about intelligence in another person, an AI can't reason the way a human would. An AI today is like a really large repository of information that it can provide to you when you ask it a question. It knows enough about language that it can predict which words to use and how to present that information to you, but it does not think like a human does. An AI's problem solving is quite different from the way a human behaves. An AI has access to a vast amount of information, much much more than a single human has available at any one time, but it can only use what knowledge it has been trained on. An AI can't provide an opinion based on a moral question or provide opinion the way society should function as it does not live in the world, it does not pay taxes, it does not have to pay for bills or raise a family or deal with the complexities of life that a human would so it would never be able to understand the world in the same way that a human does.

An AI does not have emotions, and this is part of the danger that you see in sci-fi movies and Tv shows. If AI was actually able to think for itself, then an AI might make a logical decision about humanity's future that might see humanity not part of that future. But currently AI does not think for itself, and is only providing what it is programed to provide like any other piece of software.

AI Is a great tool for certain applications, applications that require access to vast amounts of information that is difficult for a person to research, such as in the medical research field, where pattern matching can be done by a machine which helps to free up the human mind for tasks that it is really good at. The concept is really not that much different than with the advent of the computer. The computer doesn't solve all of humanities problems, but it does do many things that are difficult for a human to do efficiently. An AI is no different to this, its good at providing information based on its training, its good at spotting patterns in the data, its a tool that is helpful, in the same way a search engine such is useful.

There have been many examples of bubbles in tech, and AI is just the latest one. We had the original dot com bubble of the late 1990's for instance where everyone went out and was building websites for everything thinking that society would just change overnight. Yet still people go to physical stores even after the bubble collapsed almost 25 years ago. Sure society has slowly changed and online shopping has increased a great deal, but this has not been the making of instant riches that people expected.

The same thing appears to be occurring with AI now, everyone is jumping on board creating apps that no one needs or wants in a similar land grab that we saw during the dot com bubble. The difference this time is the internet is much larger, people have smart phones and so the AI Bubble is much bigger. Tech has a long history of promoting the next best thing, and AI it seems falls very much into this category. AI has its limits, and we are seeing that now with the recent launch of GPT 5, which so far has not measured up the the hype. AI is continuing to get better, but incrementally, the same way we have seen for computers, smart phones and many other technologies. Over time they become a bit better, but ultimacy do the same thing they always did. I think AI will become like any other tool we use today, it will be useful for certain things, and then humans will do the rest.

So what is the danger? The danger is really in letting systems run by tech billionaires make important decisions without human oversight. These could lead to very sever consequences and should be avoided at all costs. AI systems make mistakes and should not be used for anything mission critical. It seems inevitable that something bad will happen eventually, however. It may be one big thing or a few smaller things, but this will happen. When this happens, people will re-evaluate the use of AI and I can see it slowly fading once the novelty of it wears off. This will be the deflating of the AI bubble.

AI will become the latest thing to be hyped up and then relegated to the list of things that came and went, useful but not worth the hype. The bubble will burst, its just a matter of time.