> It is hard to overstate the damage that the infinite money being poured into AI is doing to the wider economy
I know it's an unpopular opinion on Hacker News but I think most people are overstating the damage to the economy. Increased demand starts to pull more advancements forward and increase spending on production, which benefits everyone.
Transformer demand is real, but what percentage of your electricity bill do you think goes to spending on those transformers? The number is so small that it's a rounding error. Many examples like this where we see headlines about some part going up in price and forget that it's such a negligible piece of our bill that it barely matters.
The cost of fuel inputs for base generation and peak supply are a bigger factor.
> I know it's an unpopular opinion on Hacker News but I think most people are overstating the damage to the economy.
There are two issues... one being that an economy needs people to buy things to work, and people only can buy things if they have money, and people only have money when they have work - but everyone is laying off people left and right due to "AI".
The other issue is that there's trillions of dollars floating around between all the companies. It is likely that a significant chunk of these will fail and give us another 2007.
We'll be out of work whilst bailing out these companies with printed money and another round of inflation. The middle class will cease to exist. But hey the stock market will show higher numbers so its all good.
The damage is not merely in the increased demand for electricity. Actually, assuming governments get their heads out of the sand about energy poverty, cheap solar, wind, and batteries will fix that. The real problem is all the other crowding-out of investment that having one big megahit technology can do.
Let's say you're an alchemist living in ancient China. You discover some kind of strange material made out of melted sand and want to sell some of it as a drinking vessel. One problem: everyone already uses porcelain for that purpose, which holds hot drinks without cracking like your strange sand ones do. So you toss that in the trash and move onto the next attempt at making an elixir of life.
Problem is, what you invented was a kind of glass; which has no economic niche in the society you live in. Some funny other places in the far west might invent it, though - hell, they might even figure out that you can grind this material down into lenses and discover an entire field of magic - optics - that you discarded because nobody needed tea cups that crack when you put tea in them.
Now, let's say you live in a society that has access to some kind of artificial intelligence. You are going to chuck the AI at absolutely everything, because on average, it tends to be better at all the problems you throw at it. Even simple things like spell-checkers get turned into AI invocations because, well, the Bitter Lesson dictates that having enough compute and learning to throw at the problem will always yield a better result than hard-coded nonsense logic that demos well. And even if you want to, well, you couldn't afford the RAM to run modern vibe-coded slop software anyway. Porcelain crowds out investment in glass, and as a result, we are limited to only having technologies that can be made by or from a pile of stolen books tied together with a bunch of matrix multiplies.