alt Hacker NewsManias go back a long way.
The history of the UK's railway mania in the 1840s is worth researching, because it's uncannily similar, with a stock bubble, fraudsters and chancers, huge hype, cutthroat competition, boardroom intrigue and drama, miles and miles of unnecessary infrastructure in the wrong places, and eventually a technology that became useful, but could have been developed more intelligently.
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And manias are so foundational to the relatively young field of AI that they made the term “AI winter”. We should brace for the third (I think) AI winter soon
The paradox of the cutbacks after the railway industry corrected is that more or less every track they got rid of would now be useful. The Beeching cut damage done to East Sussex, for example, is devastating and unfixable.
And railways are now mostly state-funded infrastructure. Seems plausible to me that the same will happen with LLMs.
Manias are required for humans to develop a new technology. It’s just part of the human condition.
Tilting at windmills over the stupidity of it is just something I’m trying to get over and not care about at a personal level. Nothing I can do about it either way!
I recommend the book/audiobook „ Boom and Bust A Global History of Financial Bubbles“, it does a great job covering various bubbles, with historical context, and going through the details of regulatory and economic factors
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/boom-and-bust/D09C2E3BE...