posted in Technology
'Big Short' Investor Expects AI Bubble Burst 'Sooner Than Later'
gizmodo.com/big-short-investor-expects-ai-bubble-burst-sooner-than-later-2000818889
Replying to @return2ozma@lemmy.world
The AI bubble will “burst” as soon as they figure out how to inflict all the damage onto regular working people. The housing bubble bursting is what enabled the ownership class to kick a bunch of working people out of their homes and then buy up all the recently vacated real estate for cheap. Nothing about the damage that the rich did to our economy caused any of them to face any actual consequences.
The promise of AI was that it would replace all the workers, but it’s not doing that fast enough and it’s beginning to look like it never will. We’ve been hearing that the AI bubble will “burst any day now” for years at this point, but if it happened right now, the ownership class are the ones who would be left holding the bag, and that can’t be allowed to happen. When they find a way to take it out of our hides, we’ll see that suddenly the “invisible hand of the free market” will present a scenario such that the floodgates open and the bloodbath is finally allowed to proceed. I imagine that’s why they started wrapping up so many pension funds and the like in AI investments.
Replying to @raspirate@lemmy.world
ownership class
pension funds
Same thing. Pension funds ARE the ownership class.
I’ve been commenting that people over 55 own 52% of the US and baby boomers as a generation own ~8x more than billionaires as a class, but I re-checked and I’d quoted the wrong number in a bunch of my comments. 52% is for baby boomers only. All over 55s added together are actually over 70%. Let that sink in.
The entire goal of the economy is to let old people enjoy the spoils of the young’s work. Even billionaires are just a symptom of a larger, systemic issue.
Replying to @boonhet@sopuli.xyz
They own, but they don’t control that ownership. Their savings are used as investment funds, but very few actually know what they are invested in. That control is in the hands of the indexes. S&P, NASDAQ and the like. Just because NASDAQ blessed SpaceX with being part of their index, millions of pensions bought the stock.
Replying to @wewbull@feddit.uk
They don’t control, yes - the control (on the level of the individual companies) is being handled for their benefit though. Line must go up for the shareholders - aka old people.
Replying to @boonhet@sopuli.xyz
…handled for their benefit though.
Theoretically, yes. In reality they’re a long way down the food chain.
Replying to @wewbull@feddit.uk
So shareholders are now a long way down the food chain? If that’s the case, maybe publicly traded companies aren’t as evil as we once thought.
Replying to @boonhet@sopuli.xyz
People investing to try to have a pension at the end of their working life are a long way down the food chain.
i.e. every working person.
Replying to @wewbull@feddit.uk
On an individual level: Yes. Even a thousand (median) retirees don’t own as much as one billionaire. But in total: All the old people together own an order of magnitude more assets than all the billionaires put together. Because there are so many old people. A large part of it will be their homes of course, but there’s still a metric fuckton of stock in there via retirement funds.
Go look at Amazon for a particularly egregious example of a corporation that abuses its workers. One would think Jeff Bezos owns a huge part of it, but actually he owns about 8% of it, being the biggest individual shareholder. 75% of float and 68% of all shares are owned by institutions. Then look at the biggest institutional holders: They’re all companies providing ETFs and mutual funds. Most of that (obviously not all) is retail investors and retirement funds, as a lot of rich people find such fund investments boring (average ~10% annual growth long term is not enough when line must always go up). Thus a large proportion of the wage theft by Amazon benefits people investing for retirement, or that have already retired.
Some economic systems fix this by giving every worker and every retiree an amount of money every month and not allowing anyone (retired OR working) to have any investments at all. This puts an upper limit on how much any individual person can own and spend. It affects retirees more than workers because retirees are the ones who have had time to amass wealth in their working years. There’s less inequality, but the downside is that no matter how hard you work, your retirement will be exactly the same as everyone else, including those who barely work.
There’s no perfect answer. Under capitalism, workers will naturally feel that the ownership class (mostly old people who were smart and prosperous enough to invest, or lucked into a job with a real pension) own too much. Under communism, retirees are likely going to feel they aren’t being rewarded enough for the hard work they put in throughout the years. But crucially, neither extreme, nor really anything in between, addresses the fact that most countries’ populations are aging, and the lives we’ve gotten used to, have been based on there being fewer old people than working people.
Replying to @boonhet@sopuli.xyz
I feel like we’ve gone a long way down the the rabbit hole from the point I was trying to make.
These idea of an “owner class” at fault is wrong, because it’s really the pension investment funds of normal people who don’t control their investments directly. Those funds are legally required to buy stocks which are listed on indexes, and all other decisions of what to buy are the fund managers.
It’s the investment banking and finance industry that control where the money goes.