Episode 21: The AI Bubble, with Matt Scherer

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Welcome back to Dreaming Against the Machine. I'm your host, Adam Becker. This week's guest is Matt Shurer. He's a fellow at the Open Markets Institute and a friend of mine, and he is a man on a mission. He is working to make sure that when the AI bubble bursts, as it will, We do not have a bailout for the big tech billionaires who are behind it. And in fact, he has a report titled No Bailout for Big Tech Billionaires that there's a link to in the episode description. So I understand that this may sound like it's a kind of depressing subject for an entire episode of this podcast, but trust me, it's a great conversation. I think you're going to enjoy it. And... This is fundamentally about making sure that something like this can't happen again and that the people who are currently flying our entire economy into the side of a mountain don't get away with it. So, here's Matt. Matt, welcome to Dreaming Against the Machine.

Thanks for having me, Adam. So why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself for our listeners? I am a fellow at Open Markets Institute. I started this fellowship at Open Markets Institute at the beginning of the year. It's focused on the AI bubble, or what I certainly think is an AI bubble, and trying to both explore the breadth of it and try and convince people, especially in the policy world, that The risks that it presents are serious and should be treated as such.

Okay, so really sunny stuff.

And easy to talk about, too, I'm sure. Well, there's certainly plenty to talk about. Oh, well, yes, there's plenty to talk about.

But yeah, no, I think... And wait, hold on. Before we dive into it, your background...

I'm a lawyer by training, which if you look at my resume, there is absolutely no reason I'll admit that anybody would think that I am qualified to write about macroeconomics and the threat posed by the AI industry. Okay,

but hold

on, just to interrupt to make a joke,

but are macroeconomists qualified to talk

about macroeconomics? Yeah. I do not think that they are. The funny thing is what I always describe this as is like there is such a thing as being too close to the subject you are studying. I do not by any stretch of the imagination want to suggest that there are not trained economists out there who are not as worried about this as I am. But by and large, the economics profession, number one, when you are looking at the sweep of what you've