The Everything Machine and the Trillion-Dollar Bet

What if the story we're being told about AI's inevitability is hiding something underneath? In this episode, Jessica and Kimberly sit down with George Kamide, anthropologist, community builder, and co-host of Bare Knuckles and Brass Tacks, to look past the headlines about the AI bubble and ask who actually has skin in the game.This is an episode about following the money, but it is also about following the questions. What is the outcome we actually want from this technology? And what happens to all of us when the people building it cannot answer that?Topics CoveredWhy the dot-com bubble is the wrong analogy for AI infrastructureHow special purpose vehicles and obfuscatory financing hide AI debtThe Magnificent Seven and concentration risk in the S&P 500Taiwan, TSMC, and the helium supply chain most people have never heard ofThe "everything machine" promise and why it cannot pay for itselfWhy an AI crash could starve the narrowly-focused applications that actually workThe labor reorganization problem and why generalists may winWhat chatbot tutors get wrong about teachingMythos, the open source ecosystem, and concentration of access to powerful toolsWhy we keep analogizing ourselves to whatever technology we just builtReferenced in This EpisodeGeorge Kamide and Bare Knuckles and Brass TacksEd Zitron's reporting on AI infrastructure at Where's Your Ed At, including The Hater's Guide to the AI Bubble and AI Bubble 2027Paul Kedrosky's analysis at Honey, AI Capex is Eating the Economy, which compares the AI buildout to past infrastructure boomsDavid Shapiro's earlier appearance on the show, Beyond Work: Post-Labor EconomicsDeepLeaf, the Moroccan agritech company using AI to help small farmers detect crop diseaseThe MIT Antibiotics-AI Project that used deep learning to discover a new structural class of antibiotics against MRSAKhan Academy's Khanmigo and the recent reckoning with the limits of LLM-based tutoringRaffi Krikorian, CTO of Mozilla, and his New York Times op-ed It's the End of the Internet as We Know It on Mythos and open source accessMichael Pollan's new book A World Appears: A Journey into ConsciousnessLeave us a comment or a suggestion!Leave us a comment or a suggestion! Support the showContact us: https://www.womentalkinboutai.com/