After the AI Crash

https://potsandpansbyccg.com/2026/07/29/after-the-ai-crash/

33•sysoleg•52m ago

Comments

fidotron•14m ago

Without AI there is no future US economy. You're all in.

21asdffdsa12•12m ago

Eh, the empire aka, protection of free trade as a service is still alive and well with no viable alternative on the horizon. Every other empire is either not free trade or - just plain mercantilism and thus will exploit way more then the quite "idealist" us- trump is just a taste of what the others in power would feel like.

21asdffdsa12•11m ago

That machinery and attached industries would keep on paddling for a while.

fidotron•10m ago

Without AI the Chinese have won already.

If you haven't noticed it's because you've stayed too close to the homeland.

rvz•4m ago

China won already with or without AI. You just did not realize it yet.

The US is in a position where they have to debased the dollar all the way to zero and the Japan carry trade will slowly unwind for the worst as soon as the Bank of Japan (BOJ) begins to increase rates in more than 30 years.

classified•3m ago

With AI the Chinese have also won.

jhonof•9m ago

Isn't the US like very clearly anti free trade at this point?

pastage•2m ago

They still need the protection and enablement of free trade.

pastage•4m ago

I think the Hormuz saga and how China just quietly stopped importing oil are signs that we are nearing the end of the "free trade as a service" from the US. There are so many aspects of that I do not understand yet: how much oil trade will be done in yuan in the future is one that leads to other question about the current wars and what will happen when those end.

lirolero•7m ago

You promise?

enriquto•6m ago

> Without AI there is no future US economy

I'm already on it, man, don't need to convince me!

jitl•6m ago

im sure people will continue to want to eat food, live in houses, go on vacation, look at phone, send email, drive car, even if there’s no ai money frothing around

fidotron•3m ago

They can totally print more dollars to spend on things made somewhere else.

nixonaddiction•8m ago

i mean my line is always "when." people have been saying ai is a bubble and will crash since the beginning. the question has always been "when." i think the best framing of the ai crash is not in terms of software, but in terms of real estate and infrastructure. the real cost is hidden in construction contracts and people buying up land (and chips, transformers, generators, etc), not in technology. this will be the 2008 real estate crash, not the 2000 dot com bubble. (altho this point is not my most well researched point, i tbh need to look more into hard numbers of where the most risk is distributed, ai software startups or data center contracts. but i also am in grad school i have papers to publish and no time.) im also gonna push back on the "diseconomy of scale" point. while its true that the best models rn use the most resources, we are building better smaller models as well. i recently set one up on my 12 gb vram and while its not nearly as good as claude, it works. i make it write really simple code for me. and we are still improving small models. i think theres some level of hope to economy of scale. obviously there are going to be physical limits, but im sure there will be a way to get economies of scale to work.

_override•8m ago

When it comes to the AI crash honestly my biggest concern is what is going to happen to the job market during and the years following the crash. Not sure how things are in the rest of the world, but as someone in their early 30s working in the IT industry in Sweden I’ve never seen the market this competitive before, even for mid level and senior roles, and it worries me what the future of employment is going to look like.

Maybe those older than me have been through this kind of thing before in 2008-2009 and in the early 2000s but the state of the IT job market in the last year or two has been really concerning to me. Anecdotally I’ve also heard it’s very tough for new graduates these days.

mosura•5m ago

One of the strong arguments in favor of AI accelerationism is net pain reduction by making the transition period as short as possible. Ideas like “pacing” or a crash and reboot will prolong the inevitable.

contagiousflow•5m ago

What is inevitable?

phoronixrly•3m ago

That all persons doing intellectual work die of hunger as they cannot find a job. At least that's how I understand what parent commenter is implying. They say that all people doing intellectual work better die quickly so they don't suffer a long 'transition period' to inevitably being dead of hunger.

N_Lens•2m ago

The pacing and the prolonging, obviously!

Kuyawa•4m ago

AI investment will crash but AI itself (the technology) will continue thriving, learning, improving and there is absolutely no way to stop it. The only reading on the crystal ball is if US companies fail, China will take the lead by leaps and bounds, so the only solution is to keep pushing the cart until the wheels come off or we all cross the finish line, together.

outworlder•1m ago

Just like every AI cycle that came before. At every cycle, we get a new tool. But we also get an extended "AI Winter" where investment dries up. This has been happening since the 1980s, we just keep redefining what "AI" is. At every cycle we move the line a bit; at one point voice recognition was firmly in the AI camp(and before that, science fiction). Now we have a machine that can do that in our pockets and nobody cares.

Does anyone remember expert systems?

classified•1m ago

I didn't know there is a finish line.

rektomatic•1m ago

what exactly is this finish line? AGI?

bbmatryoshka•1m ago

Those analyses tend to not consider the government interest in having AI as a weapon: now AI labs are fully part of the military sector, making them much more supported by the system