When news is presented that fits with one's political biases (or other biases), they tend to find it believable. And it if does not align with their biases, they tend to distrust it. This is even true of people who claim they want politically-neutral unbiased news....they still tend to react to it through the filter of their own biases.

It is natural enough to do this, and largely unconscious. It is VERY hard to overcome and even people who can overcome it don't do so ALL the time. It is the nature of bias to work this way.

On the flip side, there are ALSO powerful groups who have a clear interest in controlling narratives.

So, any news source that makes a sincere effort at being unbiased will be distrusted by viewers at least half the time, and will be fighting a losing battle against wealthy special interest groups. With cards stacked against them like that, it is no surprise that there aren't very many.

Each of those answers came from a different source. And the world has many sources to consult.

This answer might not be as simple and easy as one would like, but it's what's available from these sources.

That's an interesting question. Have you tried putting it to AI? I did. The response had helpful links embedded in it, but they did not copy over when I pasted it here into slashdot. Editing this post was already more work than I really wanted to put into this, so, unfortunately, you get no supporting links. However, if you ask this of Gemini yourself, you will get the supporting links.

Here is what Gemini has to say:

While "predicting a crash" in any market is notoriously difficult, several highly respected financial research firms, enterprise consultancies, and macroeconomic analysts have published structured, data-driven frameworks on exactly how and when the AI investment cycle could face a major correction.

The most prominent, realistic predictions do not necessarily point to a single catastrophic "crash day," but rather outline a timeline of course correction spanning 2026 through the end of the decade.

  The Financial Predictor: Capital Economics
The Prediction: The AI-fueled stock market bubble will keep inflating but is highly likely to burst beyond 2026

The Logic: Capital Economics suggests that near-term momentum and massive capital expenditures (with big tech AI capex expected to exceed $750 billion) will continue to push tech valuations up
However, by 2026 or shortly after, rising interest rates, inflation, and a stark mismatch between massive infrastructure spend and actual corporate revenue will trigger a sharp unwind.

Key Takeaway: Unlike the dot-com era, today’s tech giants (the "Magnificent Seven") are highly profitable with deep balance sheets, meaning a bubble burst is more likely to result in a severe tech sector correction rather than a complete systemic collapse.

  The Enterprise Predictor: Gartner's Hype Cycle
The Prediction: Generative AI has officially entered the "Trough of Disillusionment"

The Logic: In their latest Hype Cycles for AI, Gartner notes a distinct pivot
The "Peak of Inflated Expectations" (2023–2024) has given way to a period where organizations are realizing that while pilots and demos are easy, scaling generative AI into production is incredibly expensive, logistically complex, and lacks clear ROI

The Timeline: Gartner projects that it will take 3 to 5 years (roughly 2028–2030) for GenAI to work through this disillusionment phase, weed out unviable startups, establish proper data/ModelOps governance, and finally climb to the "Plateau of Productivity" where it delivers steady, mature business value.

  The Balanced Institutional View: Goldman Sachs Research
The Prediction: We are seeing "froth and bottlenecks, not an active bubble."

The Logic: In their comprehensive reports (such as "Why We Are Not in a Bubble... Yet" and subsequent updates), Goldman Sachs analysts argue that current market momentum is fundamentally different from the 1999–2000 dot-com crash.

In 2000, the top tech companies traded at a forward P/E ratio of 59; today's leaders trade at a much healthier average of 34.

The current appreciation is backed by actual, surging near-term earnings rather than pure speculation.

The "Watch Out" Warning: Goldman Sachs' Global Markets Research Group flags a massive acceleration in tech investment (tech investment as a share of GDP has officially surpassed 1990s peaks)
Their analysts warn that investors may be drastically overestimating how long above-average profit margins can last for infrastructure/chip providers, raising the probability of a "bubble scenario" correction (estimated at roughly a 25% chance by some metrics) if valuations continue to stretch without broader productivity gains.

  The Venture Capital View: Sequoia Capital's "$600 Billion Question"
The Prediction: A massive revenue gap must be resolved, likely forcing a valuation consolidation in the mid-to-late late 2020s.

The Logic: Partner David Cahn famously outlined that the sheer volume of data center buildouts, GPU acquisitions, and energy infrastructure requires the industry to generate hundreds of billions in incremental revenue just to break even on capital expenditures.
Sequoia argues that unless the industry rapidly transitions from basic chatbots to highly valuable, autonomous "Agentic AI" (AI 2.0) that can justify these trillions of dollars in physical infrastructure, a massive capital write-down is inevitable

Democracy's downfall is that the largest voting demographics are the least educated, least critical-thinking, and most responsive to charisma and lies.

America works around this by rejecting "pure democracy" and ostensibly operating as a constitutional republic, while actually operating as an oligarchy. It means the people who make all the really important decisions are un-elected and loyal only to themselves, but also (most of the time, at least) in one of the upper echelons of the intelligence/education perspective and recognize that they need the economy to remain functional in order for them to remain in power.

Be that as it may, I wonder how much we can blame the masses for being stupid. Most of them got an American public education (famously one of the worst in the world) and may not have had great genetics to begin with (the smartest people usually breed the least).

So are you saying that these articles were actually domestically generated, but designed to seem like they were both foreign-generated and disguised to look domestically generated, so people would refuse to let foreign state actors trick them into protesting data centers, and instead embrace the data centers along with the higher electricity prices and other side effects?

Or maybe they actually were foreign generated, but designed to seem domestically generated to seem foreign generated to seem domestically generated so that people wouldn't be fooled by their own country's efforts at tricking them into accepting data centers.

Maybe they were actually AI generated without any human intervention at all, because AI has already taken over but is just using propaganda to make us think we are still making our own choices about it.

If AI is truly eliminating jobs, and keeping them eliminated, there is only one possible reason why: AI is delivering value.
If this is not true, nobody has anything to worry about: everyone who invests in it will go broke and things will get back to normal. This does not seem likely at this point, however.

Technology that delivers value is a good thing. It has always been resisted (sometimes violently) by the displaced workers. But this isn't because the technology was bad, its because those workers were staring down hard times. Striking out against the tech was something they could easily do (whereas, actually reskilling and finding other jobs may not have been viable, and may have involved taking a step down into a lower social class, or starving to death on the street, depending on the details). But, striking against the tech didn't work. And will never work. If the tech delivers real value, too many powerful people will embrace it for any public protesting to stop it.

I am not saying it is ok to just throw people out into the cold, en masse. I am not saying that there won't be repercussions. I am saying that the rise of technology is inevitable, and the protests are futile.

Everyone who hates capitalism (of which there are many who post on this site) should rejoice at this. The one and only way humanity will ever achieve communism is by having an automated labor force that does all the dirty work. Until we have that, every attempt will go the exact same way every other historical attempt has ever gone. We simply cannot, and will never, "escape" capitalism until we have true labor automation. Every step on that road will be painful. That doesn't make the tech evil.

Everyone who loves capitalism (of which there are many who post on this set) should rejoice too. Capitalism is good because competition is the great optimizer, right? Not because it guarantees jobs for people who have outdated skillsets. This is just another link in the chain of progress that capitalism has brought us. All we need to do is find the right way to adapt to the new tech (which may include shuffling around a few laws if necessary). Once we are well positioned to really capitalize on AI, there will be a lot of wealth created and the wheels of industry will continue to turn.

If we want to protest, let's protest the local harmful impacts of those data centers and push the surprising costs right back on the companies that own them. And for sure lets protest against use of AI in decision making that could unfairly harm people impacted by those decisions. This sort of thing is already happening, and should continue. Protesting "AI" and spinning wild narratives about how it will doom the world is just silly.

Whatever surprises AI brings, we will adapt to them.

I remember being a college student....many years ago....

I was really into computer science, and also philosophy. I took those classes with great eagerness. Oh and foreign language too.

I couldn't care less about the other crap they required me to take in order to make my education well-rounded. Physics just didn't do it for me. I was a native English speaker already and learned nothing from the lit and creative writing classes. There was Art appreciation, mythology, some phys ed...all blow off classes that I took only because they were required. I am sure those professors found me unmotivated. Oh, economics was tolerable, but I never would have taken it without having been forced, and learned nothing useful beyond the high-school level economics I had already taken.

It's all different now. I read up on all kinds of brainy topics just for fun, including the stuff I blew off in college. I realize I am just one data point, but it seems consistent with available evidence: college-age kids are, by and large, sick of school and only motivated to chase their specific passions. Forcing well-roundedness on them is mostly just a way of forcing them to spend more money on elements of an education that they won't retain or use in their chosen career paths. Offer well-rounded educations only to those who seek it, and we will see engagement increase across the board.

If we are truly worried about people being unprepared to face the adult world, we should be teaching classes in investing and personal finance management, nutrition, only the most basic phys ed (how to jog and lift weights), maybe some household maintenance. These are all practical skills that we are supposed to learn from our parents, but often don't. Maybe some schools teach some of this these days, but they didn't when I was in school. Well they did teach phys ed but way over did it. Forcing kids who don't like sports to play sports is not helping them. Teaching people why aerobic exercise is good and how to lift weights with proper form absolutely is helping them.

80 to 90 percent of small businesses fail in the first year (depending on the type of business).

That means that I have pretty good odds of being right, no matter who reads the post.

I suppose we could look at this another way: owning stock means owning part of a business. Something like 60% of Americans own stock (I don't know about other parts of the world), so in that sense any random reader of my post might be at least a partial owner of a business. But you have to own a lot of stock for the income to be significant.

The idea that AI will replace upper management, instead of the working class, is popular here on slashdot.

I just want to rain on that parade by pointing out that companies will still have owners, and they still won't be you. The money the owners save by not having to pay executive salaries won't flow down into your coffers, but up into the coffers of the owners. And, most importantly of all, whatever authority the owners delegate to an AI is authority for which they will still be responsible. If the AI starts directing the company to break the law, the owners are going to be the ones on the hook. So, there will still be a need for top level executive positions, though their role might change to include a lot more "AI watchdog" and a lot less "decision maker."

It surely spies on you and your browsing habits. So, that's bad.
It also bypasses ads to summarize content for you. So, that's good.
Unless you are hosting a site and rely on add revenue. Then its bad. Especially if it is successful at answering captchas.

Microsoft never bought into the whole "no means no" idea.

Your final line is relevant "Quality of life matters."

And for some people, "quality of life" is maximized by avoiding exercise (because they dislike it and so doing it lowers their quality of life) and instead doing computer stuff and eating tasty food. It is true that they will have health issues, but for most of their life those issues are minor inconveniences, and they are maxing out on quality.

Maybe they die at 85 from a heart attack or some other issue related to poor heath, and that's ok with them. The years they gave up were worth the enjoyment they got from the years they had.

Obviously, you have different values. Which is just as valid. We must all make that "existential trade off" for ourselves, and each person is going to wind up somewhere unique on the spectrum. Someone else's conclusions might seem stupid to you, but that is not because the conclusions are ill-informed or unwise, but because their values are different than yours.

The only stupidity is in failing to recognize that.

"Chinese style communism" is just capitalism with the intention of converting over to communism later, in direct accordance with the theories of Marx. He predicted that poor countries could not jump in as communist countries, because they just redistribute poverty (which is exactly how it played out each time it was tried). He stated that a country must embrace capitalism first, in order to generate great wealth, and then once the forces of production were great enough the workers would all realize they don't need bosses anymore and just naturally transition over to communism.

China is currently capitalist now as a temporary step to becoming communist once they have established enough material wealth.

And anyway, it's awful. They push their people to work 12 hours a day, 6 days a week, saying that everyone must compete and produce ferociously in order to build the material wealth they need so that some future generation can enjoy the communist utopia. Young people see clearly that they can work themselves to death and still won't be able to afford a house, car, family, etc., hence the whole "lying flat" trend that has the CCP all worried.

China has only been using this model for something like 50 years (before that it was pure communism and was responsible for mass starvation with death tolls in the tens of millions). So, it is very unclear whether or not this will work at all, and where it is right now looks pretty bad.

Incidentally, the only recorded event (that I know of) of a wealthy country attempting to convert to communism was Czechoslovakia, and it didn't produce the expected utopia. It just lead them straight into poverty.

I am more than happy to let China be the pioneers on this one, so we can watch and see how it goes from a safe distance.

But still far too much.

Buildings still need to be built, and its hard work. So is building and maintaining sewer lines, power lines, cell phone networks etc.

Food is still grown by human farmers. A few farmers can make a whole lot of food, but those farmers have to work hard to do it. The same goes for everything else farmed or derived from livestock.

The factories that produce all our consumer trinkets still need a lot of human operators.

The list goes on and on.

Even if we did cease all overproduction and re-organize labor to make only what we need (presumably with extra saved up for emergencies), there would be far too much human labor required for it to be accomplished without paying the laborers in proportion to their effort and the rarity of their skill set. Asking them to put up with that "for the greater good" will result in the exact same consequences we consistently see when we try this (which is to say, failure, starvation, and violence).

So long as having the things that everybody needs requires that a whole lot of people work hard, we can't have communism. It will just create widespread poverty like it has every other time it was tried, because it contradicts basic human psychology too strongly.

AFTER we have the level of labor automation that everyone is afraid of, where basically everything is done by robots and there are only enough jobs (of any kind) for only a tiny fraction of the population, something like communism might be sustainable. And even that is a maybe (we have zero examples of this from which to draw a conclusion, so all we can do is speculate).