(2025-10-27) Ford: The Argument For Letting AI Burn It All Down
Paul Ford: The Argument for Letting AI Burn It All Down. Suddenly, and not long ago, our dearest tech industry leaders began to suggest caution. Sam Altman said that AI is in a bubble “for sure,” albeit one formed around “a kernel of truth.” Mark Zuckerberg said an AI bubble “is quite possible,” though “if the models keep on growing in capability year over year and demand keeps growing, then maybe there is no collapse, or something.” Even Eric Schmidt is saying to calm down about artificial general intelligence (AGI) and focus on competing with China.
The question everyone wants an answer to is: How will the bubble pop?
My answer is: I have no earthly idea. But I really, really hope that, someday soon, AI becomes … normal.
I love normal technologies. They come with manuals. They change periodically, but you can build craft and professional skills around them.
The metric I use is the C/B ratio: conferences to blogging
work with AI all day long, and right now there are so, so many conferences and gatherings and not that many good, boring technical blog posts. The tech industry loves conferences, because our product is so abstract that it’s hard for us to figure out where we sit in the nerd-chimp hierarchy
People sometimes talk about the golden age of blogging but less about why people blogged: No one had money, and nothing is cheaper than putting words online.
Not yet, though. We may have a ways to go. The globalized economy has become, out of expedience and greed, a world-spanning suspension bridge, hung off a few giant anchorages... if one of those anchorages were to falter, just a little, and the promises fail to materialize, maybe the cable would sag and the whole bridge would crumble, and all the AI startups (including mine) would fall into the sea.
I was there for the dotcom crash. I could barely make rent, but it was delightful. I attended tech salons at people’s apartments. The price of admission was a six-pack. I switched to Linux and no one cared. I blogged day and night, as free as a bee. All I could do was read O’Reilly books, learn to code, and hang with friends
What will it be like when AI is normal and boring? Well, the magic show will be over
, we’ll continue to see tons of glazed AI-generated videos showing large-breasted human-cat hybrids abandoning their crying kittens. I’m sure we’ll see tremendous advancements in breast generation.
But then there’s everything else. We nerds have to learn how to teach people about LLMs, about how to put guardrails on AI projects and not just count on OpenAI to do it for us. We’ll have to ship products, and make smarter chatbots, and help people use these tools in good ways, even as other people are using ChatGPT to automate their dating lives
And we’ll have to do it all while the world melts, both cognitively and glacier-ly, knowing that AI is contributing to that melt. (climate change)
The entire human commons is about to become a Superfund site, and the people who made the mess will move on to quantum computing. Once the frenzy fades, there’s just going to be a lot to do, and less sovereign wealth with which to do it.
it’s when the real nerds can come out. These are the nerds who love the tech, who hack around on the weekends. But since there are no conferences, and no one else wants to hear about it, they start a little newsletter—not a “10 important links” newsletter but a “10 extremely long paragraphs on obscure subjects” newsletter—or jump on open source projects and start fighting among themselves, which is one of the greatest forms of entertainment.
I hope people share what they learn as they go. When the bubble is big, every idea feels like a billion-dollar idea. I yearn for cheap ideas from strangers.
I’ve felt so alienated from tech over the past couple of years. Part of it is the craven authoritarianism. It dampens the mood. But another part is the monolithic narrative—the fact that we live in a world where there seem to be only a few companies, only a few stories going at any time, and everything reduces to politics.
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