I recently came across a video that referred to the enormous “value” AI supposedly generates. And then it clicked: that is the bullshit!
If you use AI to generate a lot of things that are currently made using expensive manual labor, you undermine that value! That is basic economics.
If a hammer costs 10 euros and you can suddenly make 10,000 hammers for next to nothing, the value of those hammers no longer 10 euros x 10,000! No, the value of a hammer suddenly plummets to practically the marginal cost of making a hammer using the new method (in this case, AI)!
You haven’t suddenly created 100,000 euros in value, as people now like to claim! You undermine (disrupt) the market for handmade hammers.
We also saw these kinds of disruptions during the internet boom of the late 1990s. Back then, people also shouted about limitless value creation, but that value “suddenly” evaporated in 2001.
Now, just as then, there is indeed new value in the new technology. We can now solve problems with AI that we couldn’t before. Processes can suddenly be automated (until you realize the formal process isn’t working, and it seemed to work because people were tweaking it). With AI, you can uncover things faster than Googling; you just have to be more thorough in checking whether it is accurate.
Until the AI bubble bursts, you have to carefully distinguish between hot air and substance. However, that requires expertise and critical thinking, and those skills are actually disappearing in people who use AI extensively.
We all know the Chinese saying: “May you live in interesting times.” It is going to be an “interesting” 2026.
