There's a theory about technology and how it changes the world that I find myself going back to over and over again.

Carlotta Perez, in her book, Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital, proposed that whether it's the railroads or the canals or

radio or the internet, what tends to happen is this. Companies get so excited about the prospect

of the next big thing that they always overbuilt. Spending always races ahead of revenue. What follows

is a crash and then a golden age. It's important to say,

of course, that the railroads and the internet were both bubbles and life-altering inventions.

The bubble and the golden age are not one thing or the other. In fact, they tend to follow

in a particular sequence. So here's where we are today with artificial intelligence.

The biggest companies investing in artificial intelligence are spending about $700 billion

on AI every year that's on the chips and the data centers, the power, adjusted for

inflation.

That's approximately one Manhattan project every three to four

weeks. It's one Apollo program every five months. This is an insane amount of money for the

private sector to put into anything. Six months ago, I was quite certain that AI was a bubble.

And I was certain for the very simple reason that I thought history was just repeating itself.

AI spending was rising faster, I thought, than revenue could possibly match it.

And now here I want to be very careful and clear because I think some people who don't like AI for all sorts of reasons also hope that

it's a bubble because they don't want artificial intelligence to turn out to be something that's

important. But a bubble in AI would itself be one of the most important stories of the decade

for the stock market, for the economy, for unemployment, for housing, for

politics. In a bubble that blows up in 2028 would be more consequential, I think, than who

the party is nominated for president. For most of the last year, I was convinced about the

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