With some technologies, Goldfarb says, the value is obvious from the start. Electric lighting “was so clearly useful, and you could immediately imagine, ‘Oh, I could have this in my house.’” Still, he and Kirsch write in the book, “as marvelous as electric light was, the American economy would spend the following five decades figuring out how to fully exploit electricity.”
It actually wasn’t so clear-cut. There was a lot of media against electricity, especially electricity in the home and electric lightning. Some of it was commissioned by the gas industry, of course, but (some) people were also wary towards it especially as they couldn’t imagine replacing the entire gas system with electrical cables over an entire country. Once cost reached parity and outperformed gas, adoption became much quicker (likely driven by city administrations) and once people tested electric lightning the advantages were obvious. Though for a while early on old lightbulbs had a tendency to explode randomly because the bulb was in a vacuum, after that they filled them with an in inert gas to equalize pressure.
Interestingly this think tank seems to have found a link between electrification and the incidence of workers strikes in Sweden: https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/more-power-people-electricity-adoption-technological-change-and-social-conflict. Their conclusion is that workers did not strike to undo or ban electrification in the workplace (industry mainly) but for higher wages:" if you’re going to make more money from producing more, then you can afford to pay us more" was and should continue to be the message.
On the bubble itself, keep in mind that a bubble bursting does not mean its content goes away… rather it spills on the floor to be mopped up by whoever scrambles there first. OpenAI is honestly the giant I see exploding soon, their startup mentality is just not viable and unlike Microsoft or Google, they have no other product to rely on. However with microsoft acquiring 27% stake in OpenAI just recently it seems like they are already preparing to mop up the spill… I can’t deny that as big and shitty as openAI is, they do pioneer AI tech (apparently chain-of-thought which you know from deepseek-r1 was pioneered by openAI. And now they released the video model Sora 3)
A mop up leads to monopolization, a key part of the boom and bust cycle as Marx described. If OpenAI goes bust, the IP and talent will not disappear into the void, they’ll be swiftly acquired by other companies that remain in the race. And this could have implications that I can’t entirely foresee yet for open-source AI. If IP gets concentrated enough, open-source AI could disappear entirely… at this moment, it’s almost entirely reliant on Chinese models - Deepseek, z.ai and qwen are consistently the top-3 open source chinese models, even after gpt-oss came out that boasts 200B parameters people are not picking it up. Hunyuan is a recently released model to make videos, also open-source and made by Tencent.
It actually wasn’t so clear-cut. There was a lot of media against electricity, especially electricity in the home and electric lightning. Some of it was commissioned by the gas industry, of course, but (some) people were also wary towards it especially as they couldn’t imagine replacing the entire gas system with electrical cables over an entire country. Once cost reached parity and outperformed gas, adoption became much quicker (likely driven by city administrations) and once people tested electric lightning the advantages were obvious. Though for a while early on old lightbulbs had a tendency to explode randomly because the bulb was in a vacuum, after that they filled them with an in inert gas to equalize pressure.
Interestingly this think tank seems to have found a link between electrification and the incidence of workers strikes in Sweden: https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/more-power-people-electricity-adoption-technological-change-and-social-conflict. Their conclusion is that workers did not strike to undo or ban electrification in the workplace (industry mainly) but for higher wages:" if you’re going to make more money from producing more, then you can afford to pay us more" was and should continue to be the message.
On the bubble itself, keep in mind that a bubble bursting does not mean its content goes away… rather it spills on the floor to be mopped up by whoever scrambles there first. OpenAI is honestly the giant I see exploding soon, their startup mentality is just not viable and unlike Microsoft or Google, they have no other product to rely on. However with microsoft acquiring 27% stake in OpenAI just recently it seems like they are already preparing to mop up the spill… I can’t deny that as big and shitty as openAI is, they do pioneer AI tech (apparently chain-of-thought which you know from deepseek-r1 was pioneered by openAI. And now they released the video model Sora 3)
A mop up leads to monopolization, a key part of the boom and bust cycle as Marx described. If OpenAI goes bust, the IP and talent will not disappear into the void, they’ll be swiftly acquired by other companies that remain in the race. And this could have implications that I can’t entirely foresee yet for open-source AI. If IP gets concentrated enough, open-source AI could disappear entirely… at this moment, it’s almost entirely reliant on Chinese models - Deepseek, z.ai and qwen are consistently the top-3 open source chinese models, even after gpt-oss came out that boasts 200B parameters people are not picking it up. Hunyuan is a recently released model to make videos, also open-source and made by Tencent.