> It's a bit like the first .com boom. There was a huge amount of malinvestment and the bubble popping was painful

That's the point though, isn't it? How detached from reality must you be to think this is ok?

"Painful" is carrying a lot of weight in that sentence. Painful means people lost their jobs, families broke up, depression, probably suicide, other forms of violence...

There must be a better way to go about these things.

I don't disagree, but there's a big difference between 'this is massively overinvested and valued and that's distorting the market around a useful product' and 'this is all basically a scam with no value to it whatsoever'. For some reason a lot of AI critics seem to be really hard pushing on the latter part despite it being by far the least credible take at this point. It might be overused, it might have some big negative externalities (though these are often overstated), it might have sucked up way more capital than it deserved, but it's also still very useful and valuable for quite a lot of people.

(to me it's a bit like criticising oil companies by claiming that oil doesn't actually produce any useful power after its refined. There's a lot to criticise about them but the fact that their product is very useful is in large part why it's so hard to do something about the rest of the problems they cause)

I won't dismiss the human cost but boom and bust cycles have existed for a very long time. This isn't a new thing today, and it wasn't new then either.

You can view these things 100% cynically, or you can also consider the possibility that markets over (and also under) shooting are also a form of discovery in which the value of new business models, technologies, etc. are determined. While I'm not personally a fan of today's financial engineering and have concerns about direct government investments in particular, net-net it's probably better to live in economies where capital is abundant and malinvestment is possible, than to live economies where the opposite is true.

From the .com days, I personally observed four categories of outcome:

1. Total financial ruin. If we're being honest, this was often the result of individuals who got rich very quickly and spent even more quickly.

2. Survival. Lots of people got laid off and eventually found new jobs when the economy recovered. Their experience was valuable. A decent number of these people went on to ride the recovery boom and are comfortable if not "rich" today.

3. Survival with a story to tell. People who survived and came away with a story to tell ("at one point I was worth millions on paper and 6 months later I was laid off").

4. Huge windfall. Some people made a lot of money and through luck and/or smarts, managed to walk away from the implosion wealth intact.

The truth is that nobody can predict with certainty the future. Markets are the place where humans make bets about the future. Expecting entirely orderly markets in which everything moves at a predictable pace in a predictable way, where no participants win or lose too much, just isn't realistic.

Not sure how you would do things better without a centralized planning committee. Most people believe that bubbles are bad, but what's the alternative? People want to get rich quick.