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You're mixing a bunch of different "people" in the same bag. I'm not the one saying "there's never been anything like this before".

The investment is massive, but not bigger than other projects by an order of magnitude. Major wars were bigger than AI. The dot com bubble was 2-3T dollars.

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If we’re comparing war between entire nations to speculative economic investment than I’m not sure I need to make any more points.
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There may not be so much in the way of soldiers in the field guns blazing, but we are very much seeing a 'cold war' emerging with AI at the centre of it. Call it speculative, but the incentives for nations to spend are essentially the same in cold and hot wars.
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> The amount of money flowing and the sheer scale of all of this stuff is without precedent. We are seeing governments from the local to federal level literally shift their economies because of all the speculation.

Yes, the absolute numbers might now read TRILLION instead of BILLION or MILLION, but the concept of "Technology so impactful governments shift their economies" is in no way new, and has already happened a bunch of times before in humanity's timeline.

I guess that's why you're seeing some of us less stressed out about it, as again, scale is different, because scale today is different in everything, but relatively, we're just repeating another of those "Technology changes everything" milestones that we've done before.

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We have never seen governments essentially leverage their economies so heavily, so quickly, for a speculative technology. It is literally propping up a significant portion of the US economy right now.

When have we seen anything like this?

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> When have we seen anything like this?

The US canal and railroad boom in the 1800s definitely had exactly the same thing happening, just compared to our scale today where everything is "more" and "bigger", it looks comparatively small. But in their world, back then, it was basically the same thing, just with canals and railroads. Indiana almost financially ruined itself because of their "infrastructure program". The government got involved heavily with the "1862 Pacific Railway Act" as well.

And yes, easy to say now that "Duh, that's essentially infrastructure" but at the time, that wasn't as obvious to everyone, as and railroad were newfangled technology, especially deployed like that, on a scale never seen before.

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> definitely had exactly the same thing happening, just compared to our scale today where everything is "more" and "bigger",

And faster. More, bigger, faster. Which substantively changes the situation the same way a musket stops venn diagraming as a “firearm” at some point when compared to a 50-round automatic rifle.

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Because they're liars. Plain and simple. Lying is a virtue as long as the lie is powerful enough to sustain attention.
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