If you enjoyed "4000 Weeks" historical analysis of labor I invite you to check out "Free Time" by Gary Cross. It expands on it greatly, taking it through the industrial age. Relevant to your comment Cross makes the case that another reason work was not done in excess was there were not many luxury goods to purchase. Only the extreme elites could afford what little there were. There was no real return on selling more of your time for money.
> Ex: Help students visualize the past instead of just reading about it. Teachers can show their classroom a historic site and type, “Render a hyper-realistic view of what these Pompeii ruins looked like in 78 A.D.” The modern-day ruins will instantly transform into a bustling, colorful street scene from the Roman Empire.
The bubble needs to burst already. Everyone so braindead that they actually build and ship a product like this fucking garbage needs to be out on the street.
Like, read that fucking prompt again. If that doesn't make you want to stick forks in your eyes, you're deep, deep in the psychosis.
Yes, at some point the world needs to accept that these tools are very good, to a limit, for specific human augmentation uses (coding, text manipulation) and stop pretending the TAM is "replace all white collar work across the globe".
That's not good enough for investors. Right now, either something is worthless or it is literally the most influential invention in history that must succeed. Even if/when the AI industry suffers a setback, the trend of investors becoming more psychotic will continue. Every additional dollar that they need to extract for infinite growth is harder to get than the previous, so we'll likely see more financial Hail Marys in the future that people will desperately load their money into - maybe the next big thing is what will finally give us more growth again!
The low interest rate doesn't help, but I'm wondering if it could be possible that, against the ideological need to pretend otherwise, we've also hit the saturation point in a lot of industries in terms of what can be done without brand new major breakthroughs. To normal people we'd just plateau for a while, but for businesses it is unacceptable, hence the thrashing.
Baristas in NYC don't care about being greeted specifically. They want to take your order so they can move the line along. You will get a very strange look if you try to small talk in a busy cafe.
