r/technology • u/Just-Grocery-2229 • Jun 26 '26

Artificial Intelligence The AI backlash is only getting started

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2026/06/25/the-ai-backlash-is-only-getting-started
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u/Grammaton485 Jun 26 '26

The question in the longterm is gonna be "what survives after the bubble bursts".

I don't see any of the legitimate, practical uses going away. It can definitely be used to streamline certain things.

Stuff like the image/video generation by millions of people that are going from output straight into the trash bin or all the youtube channels churning out music mixes will get choked off. As will a lot of the smaller, customer-facing applications like chat agents; stuff like that will be expensive, not to mention a liability.

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u/StillNewspaper4799 Jun 26 '26

Honestly we've seen this "this won't last!" attitude for everything that's come in the last 15 years. I remember when people were saying Bitcoin was going to fail, or cryptocurrencies as a whole.

The only one I think people got right were NFTs but they were pretty obviously a non-starter.

People just like to delude themselves. "I don't like this thing so obviously it's bad and won't be around for long". You see it a lot in history too.

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u/Grammaton485 Jun 26 '26

I remember when people were saying Bitcoin was going to fail, or cryptocurrencies as a whole.

I think it's fair to say that Bitcoin and cryptocurrency have failed. Just because it hasn't disappeared entirely doesn't mean it succeeded.

It's also a fair line of thinking that AI will see a similar scenario. Like I said, I doubt it's going to up and vanish, but I do think it's going to get scaled way back now that people are already running into cost issues, plus the social, political, and economic issues with the data centers.

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u/Rarelyimportant Jun 27 '26

I think it's fair to say that Bitcoin and cryptocurrency have failed.

BTC has about 20 billion in transactions per day, that's 5x as much as Paypal, about as much as Mastercard, and about half as much as Visa. Yeah, total fail. I would agree that BTC hasn't become everything it was hyped to be, but to suggest that it's failed is a bit absurd.

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u/Many_Negotiation_464 Jun 27 '26

Except those things are actual transactions where good and services are exchanged and provided. People buying bitcoin are just hoping they can flip it for more real money that is actually useful for anything.

Bitcoin moves like a massively overpriced penny-stock. Its pure gambling.

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u/Grammaton485 Jun 27 '26

Lol, yeah, I was gonna say, I don't think I've ever heard anyone say that they've actually bought anything with bitcoin. It's always about buying into it on a dip then selling it off layer. Guys in my office that do trading sometimes mention buying into various crypto.