Just How Bad Would an AI Bubble Be?

> The entire U.S. economy is being propped up by the promise of productivity gains that seem very far from materializing.

or, even worse perhaps the productivity gains will be high.

I'm not sure if this point is essential or pedantic, but they're not claiming that the economy is being propped up, just stock prices.

They are claiming both. Business spending on AI is more than all consumer spending combined as a share of GDP. That’s propping up the whole economy.

I don’t think its doing so much propping up because the spend is being thrown into a couple of piles. When companies hire some ai superstar for millions it isn’t like much of that money is circulating in the wider economy like if you invested it into a diversified portfolio or hired a lot of lower wage people who spend a much higher share of their paycheck on stuff that keeps it circulating in local economies. Likewise if that spend is going to server racks or electricity. The money just doesn’t have a lot of avenues to spill out into different subsets of the economy.

This is probably what is going on when we see McD executives say there are basically two economies in the US at the moment, one doing very well for itself and the other experiencing a lot of hardship.