If this cycle is anything like the dot com cycle, there will be billions of dollars in capital invested in AI “stuff”. Data centers, various LLMs, derivatives of LLMs, shells of derivatives of LLMs, and other tangential things that claim to be AI. Eventually some anal retentive shareholder activist will ask some pretty basic questions about return on investment, the wisdom of investing so much in capital that depreciates rapidly, the actual value of all of this.

Truth be told, a lot of the predictions from the peak dot com era came true, it just took another decade of technology development and the widespread deployment of broadband. The hype cycle inevitably outpaces the market reality by several years, even if elements of it are true.

And a lot of the “efficiencies” of moving commerce online simply got appropriated by new middlemen. Amazon, Google, Apple each take their transactional vigs. Hard to argue that the current advertising supported media market is efficient when the most successful sites have to meter access to content with subscriptions (and chum ads that burn your CPU).

UBI? Not going to happen in an allegedly capitalist society like the US. We're all temporarily embarrassed millionaires who resent paying anything to support someone else's lifestyle. Far more likely to eliminate entire categories of jobs and careers.

It’s curious to me that the investor class will pour billions of dollars into “AI” over the coming years seeking to replace labor costs instead of investing in improving the efficiency of the existing labor pool. In some ways this is like the outsourcing/offshoring rager the investor class had over the past thirty years (that was the thing people should have worried about in the 1990s but did not). In the goal to shave pennies per share of costs and juice market returns we wiped out entire job categories and industries in the US. Sure, we got cheaper devices and other manufactured goods, but ignored the social costs.

So, what will happen next? It’s a big muddle. If you’ve spent billions investing in various LLM processing systems, can you reasonably expect to generate revenues and profits from the very people who are now unemployed or underemployed due to the very LLMs/AIs/algorithms you’ve invested in?

I don’t feel a particular need to subsidize multi–billion even trillion dollar corporations with my content, bandwidth, and server costs since their genius vibe coded bots apparently don’t know how to use modified-GETs or caching, let alone parse and respect robots.txt.

In the latter years (even pre–LLM bot feeding frenzy) the number of bots inhaling content over, and over, and over again overwhelmed the perfectly normal bandwidth limits.

At least with social media it's someone else's dime paying for the hosting and security apparatus. You still get the brigading and pile–ons and death threats.

There will be a couple of tells when the bubble is popping: the Shareholder Rights Activists will flip to demanding companies execute the executives who implemented the wasteful AI strategies that they demanded, and “AI” companies will take over all of the ad slots for the SuperB*wl.

Get the burden rates for staff, calculate the realistic costs of doing DR preparations and exercises vs the realistic costs of recovering from an actual incident.

Factor in loss of staff (for whatever reason).

You can dig up the costs from other companies but you can only make it real to management if you use data and numbers from your own enterprise.

Make it a documented, financially driven business decision that they cannot ignore. They may well decide not to invest in DR/continuity prep. In that case, document your activities and start looking for new employment, they do not value the business enough to invest in protecting it from absolutely predictable, let alone unpredictable, I/T events.

I was spouse–adjacent to Google for many years and really admired their DR/continuity work and exercises. I don't know if that's written up anywhere but it really seemed to be embedded in their operational philosophy (at least up to 2020, my semi–inside exposure to Google ended then).