Something can be useful and still be a bubble at the same time.
AI is such a thing.
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AI is such a thing.
AI is currently being treated as if it's a multi-trillion dollar market. What if it turns out to be more of a, say, tens of billions of dollars market?
If it was treated as a multi-trillion dollar market, and that was necessary to justify the current investments, then it turning out to be a tens of billions of dollar market would make it not useful.
We can go to the most extreme example: Human life, that presumably is invaluable, which would mean that, no matter what, if we have an effective treatment for a life threatning diseases, that's useful. But it clearly is not: If the single treatment cost the GDP of the entire country, we should clearly not do it, even if we technically could. The treatment is simply not useful.
For AI the case is much simpler: If the AI, that we are currently building, will in effect have destroyed economic value, then it will not have been useful (because, as far as I can tell, at a minimum the promise of AI has to be positive economic value).
What else could it possibly do for us?
I had a professor decades ago who was near retirement who related how when he was an undergraduate he had to write a paper about what humans would do with all their newfound free time since they would only need to work a dozen hours a week. I’m sure similar conversations were had at the onset of steam power and electricity; we’ve been crafting the same pipe dream for generations.
My point is that we should care about quality of life as the main measure. Economic output is a proxy for that, and sometimes a poor one.