It's not as bad as the alarmist phrasing would suggest. Consider a toy example: suppose consumer spending was $100 and grew by $1, but AI spending was $10 and grew by $1.5, then you can rightly claim that "AI added more to the grow of the US economy than all consumer spending combined"[1]. But it's not as if the economy consists mostly of AI, or that if AI spending stopped the economy will collapse. It just means AI is a major contributor to the economy's growth right now. It's not even certain that the AI bubble popping would lead to all of that growth evaporating. Much of the AI boom involves infrastructure build out for data centers. That can be reallocated to building houses if datacenters are no longer needed.

[1] Things get even spicier if consumer growth was zero. Then what would the comparison? That AI added infinitely more to growth than consumer spending? What if it was negative? All this shows how ridiculous the framing is.

▲

agent_turtle 7 days ago | parent [-]

[flagged]

▲

dang 7 days ago | parent | next [-]

Please don't cross into personal attack. We ban accounts that do that.

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.

▲

gruez 7 days ago | parent | prev [-]

>Have you heard of the Dunning-Kruger effect?

Have you heard of the disagreement hierarchy? You're somewhere between 1 and 3 right now, so I'm not even going to bother to engage with you further until you bring up more substantive points and cool it with the personal attacks.

https://paulgraham.com/disagree.html

▲

agent_turtle 7 days ago | parent [-]

One of the major reasons there’s such a shortage of homes in the US is the extensive permit process required. Pivoting from data centers to home construction is not a straightforward process.

Regarding the economics, the reason it’s a big deal that AI is powering growth numbers is because if the bubble pops, jobs go poof and stock prices with it as everyone tries to salvage their positions. While we still create jobs, on net we’ll be losing them. This has many secondary and tertiary effects, such as less money in the economy, less consumer confidence, less investment, fewer businesses causing fewer jobs, and so on. A resilient economy has multiple growth areas; an unstable one has one or two.

While you could certainly argue that we may already be in rough shape even without the bubble popping, it would undoubtedly get worse for the reasons I listed above,

	▲	gruez 7 days ago \| parent [-]
		>One of the major reasons there’s such a shortage of homes in the US is the extensive permit process required. Pivoting from data centers to home construction is not a straightforward process. Right, I'm not suggesting that all of the datacenter construction will seamlessly switch over to building homes, just that some of the labor/materials freed would be allocated to other sorts construction. That could be homes, amazon distribution centers, or grid connections for renewable power projects. >A resilient economy has multiple growth areas; an unstable one has one or two. >[...] it would undoubtedly get worse for the reasons I listed above, No disagreement there. My point is that if AI somehow evaporated, the hit to GDP would be less than $10 (total size of the sector in the toy example above), because the resources would be allocated to do something else, rather than sitting idle entirely. >Regarding the economics, the reason it’s a big deal that AI is powering growth numbers is because if the bubble pops, jobs go poof and stock prices with it as everyone tries to salvage their positions. While we still create jobs, on net we’ll be losing them. This has many secondary and tertiary effects, such as less money in the economy, less consumer confidence, less investment, fewer businesses causing fewer jobs, and so on. That's a fair point, although to be fair the federal government is pretty good at stimulus after the GFC and covid that any credit crunch would be short lived.