Sure seems like a combination of TINA and massive amounts of hope.

It's a long-term gamble but a short-term win.

In almost all scenarios, a setup with this incentive structure will lead to massive adoption. It's too tempting, and with most jobs / political positions being short term (<5yrs) ones, people optimize for their time in that timeframe, not longer.

Boards will pursue stock buybacks (short term growth, long term may cause trouble if there's a downturn), banks will lend out subprime mortgages (hit your sales numbers in the short term, at the cost of long term risk), etc etc.

This situation is no different. There's money flowing in and there's less red tape since everyone is being pressured to allow it. It might work out in the long term, it might not, but it will 100% benefit those who push it in the short term. People will get promoted for driving a new data center, politicians can promote more jobs being added, everybody wins... for now.

The future economic aspect becomes irrelevant when the short term candy is sweet enough.

Ed Zitron writes about this constantly: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-case-against-generative-ai/

All of the big players - Nvidia, OpenAI, Oracle, Microsoft - are in insane circular financing agreements that would make Enron executives blush.

Meanwhile in Australia we have a "AI data centre" startup being valued at $1.9 billion and given $330 million to play with, having not built anything yet. It's co-founded by a guy that went to prison for insider trading. His wife is also an investor, who happens to be a prominent Australian influencer. The company previously focused on Bitcoin mining but have pivoted to the AI boom, claiming their cooling systems to be 60% better than competitors. Their first project will kick off soon in the Australian state of Tasmania, where there is nothing much more than sheep and tourists.

https://www.smartcompany.com.au/startupsmart/firmus-raises-3...

Unless the AI industry can figure out how to be profitable soon (to which basically nobody has a clear path to profitability besides maybe ad revenue) it's hard to see this not blowing up in a year or two. The bills for all of this are going to come due eventually and the AI CEOs can only convince investors to keep letting them burn billions for so long.