The modern information landscape is so saturated with noise, deepfakes, and propaganda that discerning the truth requires an enormous investment of time and energy. This high "cost" leads not to believing falsehoods, but to a general disbelief in everything and an inability to form trusted opinions.
Tools like Moltbot make complex web automation trivial for anyone, not just engineers. This dramatic drop in the barrier to entry will flood the internet with bot traffic for content scraping and social manipulation, ultimately destroying the economic viability of traditional websites.
The AI boom can sustain itself as long as its narrative remains compelling, regardless of the underlying reality. The incentive for investors is to commit fully to the story, as the potential upside of being right outweighs the cost of being wrong. Profitability is tied to the narrative's durability.
Corporate leaders, aiming for a three-year tenure and a stock option payout, often accept detrimental long-term deals. They willingly sacrifice brand control to aggregators for immediate revenue gains, repeating historical mistakes seen in industries like media.
Just as newspapers ceded their audience to Google for traffic, retailers are being tempted to let AI chatbots handle customer interactions. This trade sacrifices brand identity and direct customer relationships for short-term volume—a historically catastrophic move that leads to commoditization by an aggregator.
AI infrastructure leaders justify massive investments by citing a limitless appetite for intelligence, dismissing concerns about efficiency. This belief ignores that infinite demand doesn't guarantee profit; it can easily lead to margin collapse and commoditization, much like the internet's effect on media.
An AI agent was used to build a functional internal CRM iPhone app in just two hours for approximately $150 in API costs. This highlights a massive ROI compared to traditional development, which would have required tens of thousands of dollars and months of work from an engineer.
In the current AI hype cycle, a developer's reputation is built on memorable work. Creating a clever, viral, or even prank-like project serves as a better 'calling card' for one's career than pitching another generic SaaS idea. The era rewards playful and unexpected uses of technology.
The tech industry's attempt to create apolitical workplaces, championed by leaders like Coinbase's CEO, is proving unsustainable. Major national events are making this stance untenable, as the external world forces its way in and compels responses from employees and executives alike, showing the limits of the approach.