Ask HN: How is the immense public and private spending into AI warranted?

AI forward people talk in terms of oppprtunities at the scale of the 10s of trillions global labor market- in other words, not necessarily "taking" jobs but seeing opportunity to "collapse" the cost to the supplier of those income flows- employers- letting them turn a $10k/$30k/$50k/$100k expense into a $1k/$3k/$5k/$10k expense, some of which becomes income to the AI provider. From that lens, $100B capex to get recurring slices of $T pies is easy to defend.

Most people will never “recoup” their mortgage after 30 years. They will just die. Most people are not seriously thinking about anything past their most immediate effective lifespan.

People dumped a heck lot of money into crypto and NFT. At least AI makes some sense. The difference is, stocks are not the same kind of asset and something as simple as DeepSeek shakes it up a lot more.

Long term, I think it is a mix of expectations that:

- AGI/ASI would be a breakthrough worth trillions in market value

- whoever gets AGI/ASI first may have a permanent advantage (goes for other labs and other nations)

Well, virtual reality didn’t catch on. Nor did AR, NFTs, or the Metaverse. So, growth being directly caused by investment, they doubled-down on generative chat interfaces. It was less scary than the other things emerging: quantum, implants, and CRISPR.

I mean, spending money on a public service with new technology is hardly ever a bad idea. You recoup the money by having a better quality of life for everyone which then leads to economic growth and in turn more tax revenue, and so on.

Of course, there are better places to spend money on than AI, but its far from the worst ideas.