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Hello and welcome to Better Offline.

I'm your host at Zittron.

This is part two of our series on how to argue with an AI booster. When we last left off,

I'd started talking about some of the most common and vacuous talking points used by those

who defend the generative AI industry, and why a lot of them are

wholly without merit. These are the booster quips, assertions that, if you don't know much,

sound convincing, but are easily disproven with the right information. And in that last episode,

we addressed the quips that say were in the early days of AI, and that people doubted smartphones

on the internet, things they didn't do, just like they did generate

AI, which they should do. In the cycle of grief, that's the denial stage. Now we're going to move

on to bargaining. This is just like the dot-com boom. Even if all of this collapses, the overcapacity

will be practical for the market like the fiber boom was. All right, folks, time for a little history. You know me.

I'll love me some history. The fiber boom began after the Telecommunications Act of 1996

deregulated large parts of America's communications infrastructure, creating a massive boom,

a $500 billion one, to be precise, primarily funded with debt. Obviously, we're still using the

infrastructure bought during that boom, and this fact is used as a defense of the insane

capex spending surrounding generative AI. High-speed internet is useful, right? Sure, but the

fiber optic boom period was also defined by a gluttony of overinvestment, ridiculous

valuations, and genuine outright fraud.

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