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by cantor_S_drug 294 days ago
> Creative destruction is brutal math. The capital? Gone. Completely vaporized. But infrastructure isn’t stock certificates. Those fiber optic cables didn’t vanish when Pets.com did. The data centers kept humming after Webvan went dark. All that ‘wasted’ investment had already transformed into something physical. The pipes, servers, and networks that would become the foundation for Google, Facebook, Amazon Web Services, and the digital transformation that actually did change everything. The bubble’s victims unknowingly funded the future. They just paid a decade too early.

The flow of money to spur innovation is exactly like "Cambrian Explosion". We should do this more often, with biotech and future fields to come.
2 comments
flohofwoe 294 days ago
> Those fiber optic cables didn’t vanish when Pets.com did.

OTOH all the VR headsets gathering dust now didn't turn out to be quite as useful as those fiber optic cables. And I'm not sure what will remain after the AI bubble pops except for a massive matrix multiplication overcapacity ;)

I also wouldn't call all the money being funneled into a single technology a "Cambrian Explosion", it's the opposite of that, an organism being propped up that wouldn't survive on its own in a competitive environment.

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cantor_S_drug 294 days ago
Paradoxically, I think Cambrian Explosion happened because of innovation of eyes. Maybe the tech that currently was developed for VR headsets could find home in smart glasses (i.e. google glass)
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iammjm 294 days ago
The Cambrian Explosion happened because of the environmental changes, such as the amount of free oxygen available, while innovations such as eyes were the result of the Cambrian Explosion with life becoming more diversified and complex. So I guess its more accurate to think of stuff that empowers AI, such as cheaper and better GPUs and machine learning, as cyanobacteria that produced the oxygen for organisms to feed and grow upon.
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aredox 294 days ago
We should just sacrifice more people's savings[0] to fund innovation. This is truly an efficient way of doing things.

[0] "millions of ordinary investors watched their retirement accounts and college funds evaporate. The same middle-class Americans who had been told they were foolish not to participate in the ‘new economy’ now faced financial ruin. Teachers’ pension funds were halved. Family savings meant for homes and education vanished"

And pray we don't enter a "lost decade" (which is closer to 30 years, now) like Japan.

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