Worth pointing out that something being bad for the economy, from this perspective, isn’t necessarily the same as being bad for the population. Median incomes are stagnant and quality of life is declining in the US. In part, I’d argue this is because hyper scaling and overoptimising are squeezing the humanity out of most economic life, and most people are not benefitting from these trends.

There are exception: we need big companies to make GPUs, probably. But it’s not clear to me that this logic applies universally. Some inefficiency is probably going to be good for public wellbeing.