AI has the potential to create an unprecedented economic crisis, even though nobody asked for it.
Over the past few years, hundreds of billions of dollars1 have been poured into the economy to build data centers, generative AI models, chips, and more, without any public consultation or any certainty that AI will actually improve our lives. Or, for that matter, that it won’t completely distort them.
In just three years, more investments have been raised than during the Dot-com bubble of the late 1990s and the British railway boom of the 1840s - and it is happening much faster too2. But the bet that the American tech giants have made with all this money is, above all, a bet on the biggest technological debacle in human history. They are the ones choosing to pour money into it, and the AI models being developed are becoming increasingly expensive as they grow larger. Many analysts are already beginning to question their long-term profitability and are predicting, of course without sounding the alarm, a bursting of the AI bubble and the economic consequences that could follow3,4.
So what is the point?
Beyond threatening us with a historic economic crisis, the AI developed by the technocrats has already begun to disrupt our lives. A long career? Gone up in smoke because an AI model optimizes the company and makes redundant employees deemed obsolete. A ten-year degree? No longer worth anything because an AI can already do the job - and once again, much faster.
AI does not serve us, except to replace us.
The infrastructure itself cannot keep pace. Many data centers do not have enough energy to operate, so Big Tech companies are building new private gas- or diesel-fired power plants next to their gigantic projects4,5. But what real needs are actually being met here? What genuine needs justify destroying the landscape around people’s homes and disturbing their peace and quiet, already so scarce in the industrialized world?
Another shadow looms over the picture: AI is increasingly being deployed in the logistics sector. A bug in the system, or the bursting of the financial bubble, could disrupt supply chains. To what extent are we willing to outsource our resilience to AI?
We do not need AI to eat, to drink, to flourish intellectually, or to talk to our loved ones. So why allow this existential threat to hang over us: the threat of a historic economic crisis, or the increasingly insidious theft of our minds?
Fortunately, many people are not fooled. In the United States, 20 data-center projects have been blocked or delayed, representing $98 billion in investment6. Others are increasingly expressing their distrust of and anger toward this technology. And this is nothing new: throughout history, people have mobilized against technologies that threatened to take away their autonomy.
But governments and industry are unlikely to put an end to this frantic race. As we have seen, AI is now everywhere across the industrial world. If we want to put a definitive stop to this threat, what we need to prepare for is an anti-technological revolution.
