An article by journalist Carol Cadwalladr yesterday (16th November 2025).
The circularity of the finances of it all and of the attention the media give to it.
Also an interesting comparison to the Epstein Circle Of Influence Bubble, which has well and truly burst with a Bang!
Bump..
Tricky how to sum it all up but ’60s-dodgers’ (a given… I do not like dodgers) and ‘everything’s shite’ always works for me.
I’m happy to live out the rest of my days listening to cricket on the radio, going to copious local sport, drinking too much and listening to pop music from Heartbreak Hotel to Let It Be… unlike them I do the Golden Age, now isn’t.
‘AI’ hasn’t worked too well if Alexa – presumably artificial and presumably intelligent – can’t tell ‘her’ artificially intelligent arse from ‘her’ artificially intelligent elbow.
I find it a bit concerning that our government appear to be so committed to it all. Using our money. Is there really going to be some actual return on it?
There’s a sizeable chunk of the entire world’s economy being funnelled into this purely speculative endeavour.
When you say “unlike them I do the Golden Age, now isn’t” I feel I have no way of knowing whether I agree with you or not.
DeramdA.I.ze?
I have an abundance of caution relating to this.
I have just transferred my drawdown pension pot to a fixed five year annuity. In five years I will know the guaranteed sun I will get. It might be lower than the drawdown and it might not be but I need the certainty. At that time my wife’s state pension will kick in and the need for additional funds will have diminished.
Typical though in the week that I decided to do this the stock markets soared making ne question whether I was doing the right thing or not.
I think I am but time will tell.
I am quite sure it is a bubble. I work for a tech company that is getting heavily into it. We had some slightly less impressive quarterly results than expected recently and the value of the company dropped by a third overnight. As part of my compensation package is stocks based that hit me personally
As I am getting fairly close to retirement I would hope that my pension pot is now invested in relatively risk free areas, but I am going to follow up on that promptly
AI will be a success, and there will be massive advancements that we are barely aware of now, but there will be a few ups and downs before things settle down. And don’t form your opinions based on a useless ChatGPT response, that’s barely relevant the way things are going
No idea if this is a bubble; the signs are that it is, but the market hasn’t behaved particularly rationally for a while now.
Regarding the tech itself, I’ve been sceptical of some of the big claims being made for it, particularly regarding the pace of progress. We’ve seen major advances in some fields but (at present – this could obviously change) it’s not moving quite as quickly as some of its champions were predicting a couple of years back.
There is certainly a lot of money being spent building and deploying it. I probably spend about 40% of my time these days doing AI deals, but on the other hand those deals tend to follow a pattern starting at “we must have this asap” and running to “oh, that – it didn’t really work” a few months later. There are definitely some interesting things happening, but dear god there are a ton of chancers muddying the waters, and I’ve lost track of the number of eye rolling pitches I’ve sat through where jumped up “founders” attempt to leverage industrial fomo to cover the glaring holes in their product.
Taken in the round, this tech is all about iteration speed – as it is, it’s nice but not about to turn the world upside down. If it suddenly improves quickly, that could change. And as far as forecasts go, Amara’s law is probably your best bet.
From an investment perspective I think it’s the usual story – don’t have money on it that you can’t afford to lose, ensure you’re diversified and take progressively less risk the closer to retirement you get. And right now the S&P 500 qualifies as a risk. Oh, and if the bubble does pop rather than deflate then assume the crash position.
Seems to me that almost the entirety of “the market” is composed of bubbles, these days.
Here in The West we don’t seem to make very much any more except money.
I was just listening the the latest Radio 4 “Briefing Room” podcast which looks at why our productivity is poor. The experts present discussed AI and their conclusion was that we don’t know, and that obviously using it for online rubbish like producing fake lyrics, pictures or songs is fun but no real use to anyone. It can speed up basic tasks like doing analysis though the results still require careful checking.
I know from my professional experience that real substantial business change and improvement is much more difficult that just adding a bit of whizzy tech. It also requires significant leadership, lots of retraining and process change – absence of any or all of these are usually the cause of failed IT projects regardless of the technology. Conversely, if all of these are present, huge gains can be made with relatively modest tech.
So net net, I think it’s almost a certainly a bubble and can join the long list of next big things which are now yesterday’s bad but expensive failure.