> net-net it's probably better to live in economies where capital is abundant and malinvestment is possible, than to live economies where the opposite is true.

This is a false dichotomy. Not everything needs to exist at the extremes.

> boom and bust cycles have existed for a very long time. This isn't a new thing today, and it wasn't new then either.

Murder and domestic violence have existed for a very long time. Racism existed for a long time. Slavery existed for a long time.

Things can be fixed, or at least improved to reduce the human cost associated with what's essentially a governance choice.

Not sure how you would do things better without a centralized planning committee. Most people believe that bubbles are bad, but what's the alternative? People want to get rich quick.

I don't disagree, but there's a big difference between 'this is massively overinvested and valued and that's distorting the market around a useful product' and 'this is all basically a scam with no value to it whatsoever'. For some reason a lot of AI critics seem to be really hard pushing on the latter part despite it being by far the least credible take at this point. It might be overused, it might have some big negative externalities (though these are often overstated), it might have sucked up way more capital than it deserved, but it's also still very useful and valuable for quite a lot of people.

(to me it's a bit like criticising oil companies by claiming that oil doesn't actually produce any useful power after its refined. There's a lot to criticise about them but the fact that their product is very useful is in large part why it's so hard to do something about the rest of the problems they cause)

You should read his What If We're In a Bubble 3 part series.

> and a couple decades on, immense wealth has been created

For whom? "Everyone". Maybe we can quote some "Everyone is better off now/the global standard of living has increased bullshit". Have you tried to get a job that pays enough to buy the average house in your area?

> A lot of people prefer to see things in black and white because it's easier on the brain.

people also tend to sheild their sacred cows with gestures toward nuance. maybe i'm misreading you, but it sounds like your criticism of him is he has correctly identified a problem and is reporting on it, but he hasn't taken the next step of predicting the next twenty years of consequences. sounds to me like a reporter doing his job well.

Yeah, I used to be a fan of his critiques, but it's basically the opposite of reading Tyler Cowen's blog now.

I find more nuance in his arguments than on the typical AI hyper in yhe HN comment session. I can sort of predict the talking points I find here.

Anyway, I think Zitron is wrong on the usefulness of AI, but I don't need to agree with him on everything. That is the weaker part of his arguments anyway (and, unsurprisingly, where critics here choose to engage with).

He has a very solid point on the viability and economics of AI, and I am still to see facts that contradict his analysis there.

In fact, what spooks me about AI is not that it can replace me. It can't, that much is clear. I am spooked about the probable economic downturn that it will spawn. All the reckless spending is fun until the bill has to be paid.

I can't quantify how useful GitHub is as a software developer either. That doesn't prove it's useless, just that it's hard to quantify.

> Hundreds of thousands of developers have already changed the way they were working for decades

I agree on this, but it doesn't mean that there is an automatic benefit on business side ... and business is what is paying our wages & tokens!

We are still in the discovery phase, but we don't know yet if there will be enough return to repay those hundreds of billions already invested and other few trillions that will be invested in the near future.