Just How Bad Would an AI Bubble Be?

Something can be useful and still be a bubble at the same time.

AI is such a thing.

Care to explain?

Railways are clearly useful. However: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1873#United_States (Interestingly, there were quite a few railway bubbles.)

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?

> 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).

I never understood why in these types of discussions, things seem to be shoehorned into a context where usefulness is only measured in some sort of economic ROI. Economics isn’t an end; it can a means to one, but that doesn’t mean it’s the only one.

That's the entire high level premise of AI, as I understand it: Loosening economic constraints that bind us, so that we can do whatever we want to do most (which might still be work, I don't know, but that is outside the scope of this thread).

What else could it possibly do for us?