There’s no such thing as a ‘good’ bubble

Even the tech titans admit we are in a bubble. There will be plenty of losses to go round, they say, but the massive investment in artificial intelligence will leave everyone better off. In short, what we’re seeing is a “good” bubble rather than the debt-fuelled “bad” version that blew up during the global financial crisis of 2008. Such wishful thinking invariably appears during speculative manias. The truth is that while booms often accelerate the development and deployment of new technologies, they also produce painful busts. OpenAI boss Sam Altman acknowledges that some people are going to lose “a phenomenal amount of money” when the AI bubble bursts. Jeff Bezos made a similar point last week. The excitement around the...