Depends if you care about the "prediction" part or if you care about the assessment of the situation (regardless of date).
If someone in 2000 said "the subprime mortgages market is a bubble and will blow no later than 2003", they got the prediction wrong, but their assessment would be right.
You can say "AI will be able to _____" and be right 99.9 times out of 100, but the question is when.
You can say "The AI market will go to 0" and be at least directionally right eventually.
But none of it matters if you get the timing wrong.
It's like cutting out the prostate from all men at age 30 to prevent nearly 100% of prostate cancer.
We have made efficient frictionless markets a holy cow. The appropriate response is not to eliminate them.
The better part of "rapid value creation" is not the rapidity.
So a win-win. Market multipliers rarely end up well, bubbles or not.
>It's like cutting out the prostate from all men at age 30 to prevent nearly 100% of prostate cancer.
It's more like cutting steroids from all men, and letting them build strengh naturally over time by training.
It's not the predicting that's important to me, it's the assessing.
I don't care if it will do X in 2 or 5 years.
I do care if something IS "X", and we should correct course to not get the bad outcome associated with X (whenever it might come) or not.
Yes, but for should care if it's 2 years vs 50 years. That's why timeline are important for predictions.
Anyone can predict lots of things that given enough time will eventually be true. "The sun will burn out", "humans as a species will no longer exist", "the US will collapse". That's useless. But those become meaningful if they will happen within the next three years.
It's the reason the saying "the market can be irrational longer than your can stay solvent" has such important meaning.
I dont think Zitron has predicted anything 5 years too early. 1 or 2 at the outside is probably the limit.
I remember during the original internet boom the people who were given the most shit were the ones who predicted the bubble popping a year or two early.
Zitron fits quite neatly in this category: most of the predictions of his Ive seen that are "wrong" are things which could still happen and things where he gave wrong timelines.
Realistically identifying a bubble and the stupidity associated with it just requires an ability to do the research and see through bullshit. identifying even roughly when it will pop really needs a crystal ball. Mass human delusions do not collapse in a predictable way.
i think we're in that (quite long) stage with AI right now where most halfway smart people "know" but they're still invested due to the greater fool theory and still talking their book.
What do I have to lose? I'm just going to get decrepit and die anyway if it doesn't work out.
It depends on what type of thing you are predicting and why. Even something as simple as "Enron will implode" in 1995 has very different levels of usefulness if you are planning to short a stock versus figuring out what stock to buy and hold in your retirement account.
It doesn't make sense to split it though. Their assessment is that it's a bubble AND that it will blow no later than 2003. It's a single statement.
And it matters, because if all you're doing is saying there's an AI bubble then it's harder to prove you wrong but you also don't stand out and won't get a lot of credit for it. A very large number of people are saying the same thing as you, so who cares.
People like Zitron stand out because they go further than others and make detailed statements. Which happen to be wrong.