written 30 November, 2025
published 7 December, 2025
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is everywhere, and expanding quickly. Every Google search now has an AI option at the head of the list. About half of all new entries on the web are now AI generated. Students have easy access to AI answers for questions, and AI generated essays are now common at all levels of education. AI bots can do your shopping and routinely handle making reservations, needing only your credit card and login information, allowing you to do other things.
AI previews job applications and are increasingly part of online medical advice and psychological counseling. A significant number of people have AI chat buddies, particularly teens alienated by social media.
Computer code is written by AI. Complex evaluations, such as reading medical images or calculating how a DNA sequence will fold into an active protein, are accomplished more rapidly by AI than by humans. AI is essential to self-driving cars and trucks, and AI enhanced drones have changed the balance of power in war.
Hundreds of billions of dollars are pouring into AI data centers and their support infrastructure. Over the last 6 years, this river of money has about doubled the stock market valuation. The heart of this frenzy is NVIDIA, now the most valuable company on the planet, which produces the complex chips essential to AI progress. On average, over the last 6 years, NVIDIA stock price doubled each year.
It is indeed a brave new world.
However, there are down sides, even as AI works apparent miracles. Students focus on obtaining an answer, rather than cultivating the process of deriving an answer themselves. The more a person depends on AI for answers, the more their capacity for creative thinking diminishes, with measurable deterioration in brain structure, reducing IQ, leaving them more stupid. The displacement of workers, ranging from vehicle drivers to computer programmers, is creating turbulence in the economy. Mid-level management positions are disappearing.
Furthermore, AI tends to hallucinate, or fabricate (lie!). Experts in the field say this is endemic to the structure of AI, not just a bug. AI generated governmental reports, full of misinformation, have made headlines. Numerous lawsuits have been filed claiming AI chatbots encouraged suicides. AI medical assessments are biased against women's health issues.
As more socially critical infrastructure systems, such as power, water, and telecommunications, are turned over to AI, humans become less involved in operations, and are therefore less prepared for any problems that emerge. Hackers, from bored teenagers to malevolent nation states, use AI to enhance computer scams, malware development, and fraud. There is concern AI itself could turn on humanity as a logical conclusion.
AI data centers demand massive amounts of power. The industry is growing rapidly, but constructing power capacity takes time, so AI boosters submit multiple power claims, unsure where an actual site will be developed. Estimated power increases range from 15-50 percent, stressing power providers who must make long term plans. With so much money behind it, power prices are irrelevant to AI, but real people living near proposed centers see electricity rates increasing by double digits. Because AI needs uninterrupted power, other uses may face rolling blackouts.
It is proposed this power surge will be supplied by natural gas and nuclear power. But natural gas is becoming more expensive, and large turbine delivery is slowed by supply chain constipation. Billions are being poured into nuclear: restarting decommissioned reactors, building new conventional pressurized water reactors, and the promise of Small Modular Reactors (SMR). However, there are only a few nukes to restart, new conventional construction takes a decade, and SMR's are still mostly nonexistent. Since the AI power demand is immediate, the AI boom is thrown into question.
Fear Of Missing Out on the expected trillion dollar economy means many companies are trying to be first, in an industry that has yet to show it produces an economically viable product. 80 percent of AI companies have never made a profit, yet still ask for billions more. Talks have begun to get government guarantees: socialist support for this capitalist adventure.
Each week there are more articles suggesting this economic surge is a bubble, doomed to pop. Since the basic economy is already struggling, when the AI economic bubble collapses, the economic shock will be widespread.
If AI succeeds, our people become more stupid and unemployed, and if it fails the economy goes into recession. It's a 21st century miracle.
