The AI Bubble

There is no AI bubble.

There is only the eternal Human Immaturity Bubble, and once again, we are pumping it full of hot air!

History repeats the ritual with merciless precision. Whenever new technology arrives that rewrites the possible, civilization shows up late, half-dressed, and clutching its old habits. The railway mania of the 1840s saw fortunes made and lost overnight; half the companies collapsed in the Panic of 1847 while newspapers crowed that the age of steam had been a foolish delusion. Yet within decades those iron arteries had bound continents and redrawn the map of human possibility. The dot-com frenzy of the late nineties watched trillions evaporate as Pets.com and a thousand other darlings imploded, convincing the commentators that the entire internet was nothing more than tulip bulbs 2.0. Two decades later we live inside the world those “failed” companies made possible. Bitcoin and crypto endured three separate 80–95 % drawdowns between 2011 and 2022, each one greeted with obituaries and smug eulogies, only to watch nation-states and the planet’s largest asset managers quietly accumulate while the eulogists moved on to the next premature victory lap.

The script never changes: explosive discovery, speculative frenzy, spectacular pruning, triumphant survival of the signal, and eternal humiliation of those who mistook the pruning for death.

AI is merely the newest arrival at this ancient party, and, as before, we are responding exactly on cue. Another case of history repeating and how we never learn. We have finally engineered something that begins to resemble mind itself, and our opening act is to ask it to write cover letters, generate revenge porn, and chase meme-coin pumps. We have strapped a fusion reactor to a go-kart and are genuinely surprised when the wheels come off.

The invention is not immature. We are.

We keep trying to delegate the hard parts of being human, insight, taste, responsibility, expecting code to compensate for consciousness we have not yet cultivated. When a model hallucinates or an overvalued startup detonates, we point at the silicon and shout “bubble!” because it is far easier than admitting we brought playground attention spans to a cathedral-scale invention.

The real bubble is woven entirely from projection: the childlike hope that technology will finally spare us the slow, humiliating labor of growing up. Every hype cycle is humanity on its knees begging for a shortcut past its own limitations. It never arrives.

The printing press did not make us literate overnight.

The internet did not gift us wisdom on demand.

AI will not mature us by proxy either; it will only reflect, with merciless clarity, the level at which we actually choose to show up.

This is the examination room. The mirror is perfect. Whatever we bring; curiosity or consumerism, rigor or recklessness, humility or hubris, all will be amplified a thousandfold and handed back to us. Treat intelligence as a vending machine for laziness and it will vend garbage at scale. Approach it as a collaborator that demands we become worthy of the collaboration, and it may become the greatest partner our species has ever known.

The data centers are not overheating because spreadsheets got too optimistic. They are overheating because humanity has just been handed god-level leverage while still swinging it like a caveman who found a new club.

Until we cultivate the discipline, discernment, and depth required to co-evolve with something potentially smarter than ourselves, the cries of “bubble” will remain the comfort blanket of those unwilling to admit they are the ones not ready.

History’s final edit is always brutal and always the same: the noise burns away, the substance endures, and those who declared the fire dead end up warmed by it for the rest of their lives.

AI is not the bubble. 

Our refusal to mature is.

Pop it, or let it “pop” you. The choice, as always, is ours.