This AI Bubble Business: Another Shiny Object for the Sheeple

So, Zuckerberg, that kid who got rich off making us all stare at cat videos and our exes’ vacation photos, says we might be in an ‘AI bubble.’ No kidding, Sherlock. It takes a genius, I suppose, to state the bleeding obvious after everyone’s already piled their life savings into digital pixie dust.

Back in my day, we built actual bubbles. Like, the dot-com one. Remember that? We had websites promising to deliver dog food by drone before drones were even a twinkle in some engineer’s eye. And then, poof. All that ‘disruption’ turned into ‘disappointment.’ But at least with the dot-com boom, you could still type ‘ftp’ into a terminal and know what was going on. Now? It’s all ‘neural networks’ and ‘machine learning’ and other fancy terms designed to confuse anyone over 40 into thinking they’re suddenly illiterate.

The New Old Snake Oil

This ‘AI’ isn’t really new, you know. We had expert systems in the 80s. Prolog, Lisp – those were proper programming languages, not just endless data slurping and pattern recognition dressed up as sentience. We even had a chess program that beat a grandmaster. Did we call it ‘Skynet’? No, we called it Deep Blue, and we understood it was just crunching numbers really, really fast. Now, these ‘AI’ programs write poetry and paint pictures. Good for them. Can they debug a COBOL program? Can they even tell me what a COBOL program is? I doubt it.

And don’t even get me started on the ‘infrastructure build-out.’ They’re building data centers the size of small towns just to run these things. For what? So your toaster can order its own bread? So your refrigerator can shame you for that extra slice of pie? It’s all a massive energy sink, a digital landfill of pointless processing power. We used to optimize our code to run efficiently on limited hardware. Now, they just throw more hardware at it until it (sort of) works.

Kids These Days and Their ‘Smart’ Everything

It’s all part of the same problem, really. These damn kids and their fancy phones. They want everything to be ‘smart.’ Smart homes, smart cars, smart toothbrushes. What’s wrong with a regular toothbrush? It cleans your teeth. It doesn’t need to send data to the cloud about your brushing habits. Who even cares about my brushing habits? Probably some insurance company, that’s who. It’s a surveillance state, disguised as convenience.

This AI obsession is just another layer of that. They want these programs to make decisions for us, to think for us. But what happens when the ‘AI’ decides that my preferred brand of coffee is ‘inefficient’ or that my morning routine is ‘suboptimal’? I tell you what happens: I go back to my command line, where I am in control, and where the only ‘intelligence’ is the one I put there myself. It’s not about making life better; it’s about making us all dependent on their black boxes.

So, What Now, Professor Zuckerberg?

So, Zuckerberg thinks there’s a bubble. And when it pops, who pays the price? Not him, I bet. He’ll just move on to the next big thing, probably something involving virtual reality contact lenses that project ads directly onto your retina. Meanwhile, the average schmuck who invested their retirement in some ‘disruptive’ AI startup will be left holding the bag.

I’ve seen this show before, folks. It’s the same old song and dance, just with fancier costumes and more glowing screens. They’ll promise the moon, deliver a rock, and then blame the ‘market correction.’ Give me a good old-fashioned mainframe and a green screen any day. At least then, you knew where you stood. You knew what was real. This ‘AI’ stuff? It’s just smoke and mirrors, designed to keep us distracted while they build their next digital empire on our gullibility.