What AI Won't Do, IV

The great upheavals of technology are led by unknown upstarts, not by the fat and settled corporations. The true winners may bear names we have never heard, doing things we have not yet imagined.

Steve McQueen in a scene from ‘The Blob’ in 1958. Source: Getty Images

Friday, June 19th, 2026

Bill Bonner, from Youghal, Ireland

‘To every thing there is a season, and a time for every purpose under Heaven.’

--Ecclesiastes

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This week we turned over three possibilities.

The first — that AI stocks, SpaceX among them, are simply priced beyond all reason. Markets move in cycles, as surely as the oceans obey the moon, and this has every appearance of a cyclical high tide: the dearest shares ever floated, with SpaceX glittering in the foamy apex.

The rule is old and unsentimental — IPOs of exceptional vigor, the ones that set investors hooting and stamping, are commonly followed by returns that are exceptionally dull. This time is unlikely to be different. So, AI stocks, in all probability, will not make the investor rich.

Nor can we ignore the Primary Trend in the market for credit. Inflation and interest rates alike appear to be marching uphill. CNBC:

Dollar clings to two-month peak as Fed rate-hike bets mount, yen slides

Interest rates touched bottom in July of 2020, and have been climbing ever since. Yes, yes — it is a “whole new world.” Musk will plant his colonists upon Mars; AI will so swell our productivity and we shall “all be rich.” Of course. And every last one of our children will be above average, too.

But the Primary Trend does not give a tinker’s damn what we believe. If we have read it right, it will go on lifting rates and grinding down the real value of capital for years. These are just the normal heavings of the market; AI plays only a bit part.

The second possibility is that AI proves a roaring success and plays a leading role in the history of the world...but that its impresarios and chief beneficiaries surprise us. This notion arrives in two flavors. First, the Chinese are already out in front. They stuff the contrivance into robots, and the robots then perform marvels. The machines do not merely think faster and write cleaner than we do — they dance better. (See the YouTube spectacle below: “China’s Dancing Robots Just Broke the Internet — Top 8 That Move Too Human!”)

The Chinese appear to be discovering how to harness the artificial brain to practical ends that reach well beyond ghosting high-school term papers. We’ll see.

Bound up with this is the old observation that the great upheavals of technology are led by unknown upstarts, not by the fat and settled corporations. The well-financed houses are wedded to their own past success; now they are too burdened, too gouty, too arthritic to vault into the future. The true winners may bear names we have never heard, doing things we have not yet imagined.

The third — and the most provocative by a good margin — is the hesitant hunch that AI will prove a dud, or worse, a calamity.

Not every “successful” technology has been a blessing to mankind. History works Her will with no particular thought for our happiness or our health. The agricultural revolution, for example, allowed the earth to carry far more human beings. But for twelve thousand years it condemned those who took up the hoe to toil from dawn ‘til dark, to suffer zoonotic plagues and miseries their hunting forebears had never known, and to die young, half-starved, and worn to a nub by hard labor. The new hayseed had also to reckon, for the first time in the human story, with elaborate hierarchies, wars, and a parasitic government squatting upon his back.

That which grows more abundant grows less precious; and that of which we already have too much does not gain in worth as the heap mounts. It is scarcity that mints value, never abundance. So, the value of all this incoming freight — AI-created, AI-indexed, AI-searched, AI-derived, AI-delivered, a whole groaning, fake world of AI rubbish swelling like The Blob in the 1950s horror film — would tumble fast, down to the worth of one more dollar in Elon Musk’s pocket: approximately zero.

And besides — who would command a durable moat to guard his AI edge and throw off profits fat enough and for long enough to cover his fat investment? The genie is already out of the bottle, already strutting before the whole world and displaying its wonders. Everyone enjoys the use of it — which is only to say that, in relative terms, no one does.

But picture, for a moment, that some genius bolted a colossal mirror into the sky, and bathed the earth in sunshine ‘round the clock. A stupendous breakthrough, surely! Plants might grow by night. Solar panels might pour out twice the current. The need for the evening reading lamps would simply vanish, as the sunshine fell on the just and unjust alike, 24/7, making vast tracts, now dark and frozen, at last fit for habitation. A triumph for our species?

AI takes no holidays and never gets tired. But we poor mortals require our rest — to sift the day’s doings. Our wisdom, our knowledge, our grasp of the world about us is a cramped and modest thing, and not merely because we are slow-witted beasts. As matters already stand, we scarcely find the hours to connect one dot to the next. And the machine — AI — can fling fresh dots out like God creating the heavens. A whole new universe of reports we ought to read, films we ought to see, plans we ought to follow. But where is the time for them?

All of life — the human portion and the rest of it alike — is built upon a kind of balance: between action and rest, good and bad, day and night. Despite the wonders of AI, we still only have 24 hours in a day...and we need our sleep.

Regards,

Bill Bonner