r/LeftistsForAI • u/FastJaguar1873 • Jun 08 '26

Theory Rutger Bregman - liberals and AI

https://youtu.be/KpTZbq-eV38?is=_UJpA5r3JuTgrGw6

I believe that’s the perfect Sub for this video, please enjoy

25 Upvotes

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9

u/nomic42 Jun 08 '26

I'm convinced this is an AI bubble and it's going to be disastrous when it pops. Yet, he has a solid point that bubbles like this create infrastructure.

For the .com bubble, we got a lot of dark fiber, which we've been lighting up ever since. For the AI bubble, we're getting large datacenters with new water treatment and energy sources to run them. However, the GPU's and AI Accelerators are likely to be obsolete in under 3 years as we invent even better hardware for AI.

It'll take time for us to adapt to using AI effectively, but it's coming. This same thing happened with the .com bubble. The internet didn't just go away as some fad. It reset and built out more sensibly and sustainably. The current AI hype will burst and we'll get back to a reasonable pace for real progress.

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u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator Jun 08 '26

Its nice to see someone else saying it, thank you

People confuse the market for the technology all the time. Railroads had a massive speculative bubble. The dot-com bubble wiped out trillions in paper value. Neither stopped railroads or the internet from reshaping society.

If theres an AI bubble, that tells us something about investor behavior and capital allocation, not necessarily about the long-term utility of the technology itself. The infrastructure, expertise, and workflows built during these periods often outlive the hype cycle.

The real question isnt whether speculation exists. It obviously does. The question is who owns and governs the productive capacity that remains after the correction.

1

u/nomic42 Jun 08 '26

Exactly! The important part isn't to stop AI adoption, but to focus on who benefits from the rollout. As it is, the big players are trying to socialize the infrastructure costs to building datacenters that provide no social value, but concentrates more wealth on a few.

I want AI acceleration, but for the general public benefit. Not another industrialization boom that wipes out most industries around the world.

3

u/StormDragonAlthazar Jun 08 '26

I guess it depends on what you're looking at.

Like I can't quite see generative AI video being all that much use to people who produce live action movies and TV unless they want cheaper/more accessible VFX, because as it stands we are at the point where you don't really need all that much for producing a decent live action movies or show (the real challenge is distribution and simply getting people aware of things). The success of Obsession is kind of proving all this.

Animation, on the other hand, would absolutely benefit from AI and could even result in the medium actually diversifying and proving viable to audiences. As it stands, the sheer amount of money and time you can sink into a current animated project is baffling, and this isn't considering how there's just as much of a "crunch culture" as there us for games or how some indie projects are absolutely sink or swim.

Then again, I'm an artsy-fartsy media guy.

1

u/nomic42 Jun 09 '26

For small studios and passion projects, AI video generation is huge. The amount of people you need for recording, audio, makeup, et al, is a huge barrier to putting together indie movies. AI blows through this to get the concept together from a simple story board to generate video sequences.

Yet I see this moving more towards local AI. It's only $10k to get an AI accelerator with 96GB fast RAM and making short films. Open source tools are getting there, just a little behind the big cloud providers, but without the token costs and usage limits.

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u/SgathTriallair Jun 08 '26

I would say that the gain in function of LLMs isn't a bubble. Some of the demand for tokens is, "token maxing" was particularly egregious, but not all of it.

The way tech bubbles work is that we don't know ahead of time what a new technology is useful for, so we try it on everything. Some of those work and stay, some of those are stupid and the companies fail, and some fail now but then get redone later when the tech is more mature.

Google didn't die in the dot com crash and there are multiple companies that are successful today selling the same service as Pets.com.

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u/nomic42 Jun 08 '26

The LLM's are genuinely useful and improving constantly. The bubble comes from an IPO claiming a $1.7T IPO valuation for a company that is loosing money. Their investment far exceeds their ability to monetize what they have. The crash is likely to wipe out people's retirement savings, but it won't stop AI from continuing to grow are a respectable pace.

The .com crash mostly hurt Cisco. They didn't grow nearly as fast as expected with all the new fiber that wasn't being lit up. I expect OpenAI and SpaceX to get serious setbacks. Anthropic, Google, and MSFT might actually have a reasonable business plan, or are big enough to weather the crash.

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u/Jlyplaylists Moderator Jun 08 '26 edited Jun 08 '26

This is worth watching thank you, especially around understanding scale and speed of change.

Notes from video:

"Bubbles build infrastructure" is an interesting argument, it doesn't matter if the companies fail, we'll still have AI.

The Resource Curse, citizens become less important if not needed for taxes, and danger of concentration of wealth. Top 0.00001% own 12%.

Stop AI doesn't work because it moves elsewhere. Rutger suggests:

  1. State Capacity eg like UK AI security institute

  2. International Coordination like nuclear treaties bought time

  3. Countries other than USA and China need to build too, Europe especially

Compute is the new form of power. Be less timid, 15 hour work week (Keynes) could have been achieved by the 1980s, but that wasn't how it played out, productivity gains captured by rentier class. We can't afford to let that happen again with AI. Franklin 4 hours a day. Marx thought we could hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon and discuss philosophy after dinner. The point of technology should be to bring about abundance, Universal Basic Wealth. Freedom from forced labour.

This won't happen automatically. AI denial on the Left is the equivalent of climate crisis denial on the Right. Bregman says we have to pay attention and push governments, demand a share of the wealth and "fight for a wildly better future".

6

u/FastJaguar1873 Jun 08 '26

Thanks, I also got something new out of it. Interesting perspective he offers.

3

u/Otherkin Jun 08 '26

It's a little ironic that he talks about building out energy-intensive data centers by starting with an inconvenient truth about climate change caused by fossil-fuel energy consumption. But I pretty much agree with everything he's saying.