> All major technological advances have come with economic bubbles, from canals and railroads to the internet.
Is this actually correct? I don't see any evidence for a "airflight bubble" or a "car bubble" or a "loom bubble" at the technologies' invention. Also the "canal bubble" wasn't about the technology, it was about the speculation on a series of big canals but we had been making canals for a long time. More importantly, even if it was correct, there are plenty of bubbles (if not significantly more) around things that didn't have value or tech that didn't matter.
Apologies for arguing from first principles, but for anything that spurs a lot of activity, the only alternative to a bubble is this: people ramp up investment and activity and enthusiasm only as much as the underlying thing can handle, then gradually taper off the increase and gently level off at the equilibrium "carrying capacity" of the new technology.
Does that sound like any human, ever, to you?
(The only time there isn't a bubble is when the thing just isn't that interesting to people and so there's never a big wave of uptake in the first place.)
If you were right then we'd have a lot more than a dozen listed bubbles on wikipedia.
That's an absurd framing for a cute quip.
Why do you assume that Wikipedia can be trusted to provide an exhaustive answer to this question ?
I don't know enough about the early history of the airline industry but there was very definitely a long series of huge bubbles in the railroad industry.
I would be very interested in reading about huge bubbles in railroad, airline, or any other industry. Do you happen to have references (genuinely asking; the original article didn't include any references)?
Edits--
Found one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1893
Another good one:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Utility_Holding_Company... (from cake_robot here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45056621)
For reference, apple and spotify links to the Derek Thompson podcast in reply below (thank you!):
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/plain-english-with-der...
https://open.spotify.com/show/3fQkNGzE1mBF1VrxVTY0oo
There was just a long Derek Thompson podcast with a Transcontinental Railroad scholar about this! (That's why I knew about it.)
The whole subtext of that podcast was how eerily similar the Transcontinental Railroad was to AI (as an investment/malinvestment/prediction of future trends).
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The Intelligent Investor by Graham talks about investors putting so much money into airlines and air freight that it became impossible to make a return. I don't know if you would call that a bubble, maybe just over exuberance.
The AI bubble also isn't about the technology.
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