Tech Tycoons have Got the Economics of AI Wrong

Even as financial development was simply removing, some financial experts were already pessimistic. Coal, wrote William Stanley Jevons in 1865, is “the mainspring of modern-day material civilisation”. Yet it was limited and would quickly go out. Although more might be discovered by digging deeper, it would be significantly pricey to extract and these higher expenses would reduce the competitiveness of . After all, in other countries the black fuel was still in sight of daylight. Efficiency gains-using less coal to produce the exact same quantity of stuff-would not save the country. Indeed, cleverer use of restricted resources would simply provide an incentive to burn a lot more coal, which would, paradoxically, cause an even much faster usage of British reserves. There was no escape, the Victorian economist believed. Coal would be tired and the country was likely to “contract to her former littleness”.

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This short article appeared in the Finance & economics area of the print edition under the heading “Rocked by DeepSeek”

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Tech tycoons have got the economics of AI wrong

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