And then one day the consequences finally hit and you’re left reading the news “oh, so it turned out I was right and it was just common sense. Huh.”

US economy is screwed. UK economy is screwed. Neoliberalism killed it.

The reason everyone in politics is so elated by AI is the hope that a huge boost in productivity shrinks the debt as a portion of GDP. Talk about a wing and a prayer.

Probably the mistake is to keep relying on rockets and propellants. Need to think more revolutionary. But hard for a startup to do that, usually needs gov backing.

The fact is that investment is at a scale so large that current trajectories are nowhere near going to provide ROI.

The model companies are trying to milk every drop of ARR they can before IPOing. That is entirely the current narrative. You can hurt ARR before it churns if your goals are short term.

Anthropic being profitable is laughable. Sure, by some accounting measure that no one seriously uses. But looking at revenue and what they’re raising you can see the true story.

The truth is we need a revolutionary step up in capability to justify capex spend. It’s possible that might come - Opus 4.5 brought one - but failing that we’ll see the bubble pop once the IPO pumping is done.

Another example is privatisation in the UK: scrap all investment, load the company with debt, leave the consumer and govt to sort out the mess.

So the rich do it too, just on a much grander scale.

The analogy proposed here is correct rewritten as:

If one person uses an AI trained across copyrighted data, then that’s ok.

But if everyone uses that AI, it’s not ok.

Which is a bit of an irrelevant point.

Reasoning by analogy doesn’t work if your analogy isn’t well matched.

There are many systemic problems in society, but it’s rarely your direct employer’s fault.