AI Winter is Coming

Published on: 7/20/2025

Sometimes we lose sight of what a computer is for. It seems that many executives across the technology world have lost sight of what that is. Their public comments show they believe they can replace everyone with AI, when the computer is for helping people and not the other way around.

I think that AI will probably, most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there will be great companies created with serious machine learning." - Sam Altman

Luckily we have seen AI hype before as chronicled in the Machines Who Think. While it may improve some processes, It has never replaced people in it’s 70 years of history. I believe that it will eventually fail at replacing anyone. There will be a repeat of what occured with hype dying down and failures of unpredictable AI models becoming more apparent. Spin offs of the concrete algorithims that are discovered will improve user experience, while there will be a death of the unreliable predictive models that have trouble with reproducible results.

There is a lesson from Symbolics from their rise and fall in the 1980’s where they were trying to become the preeminant AI and Lisp company. They were heading up and up and up until the funding from DARPA dried up and clients had trouble with getting correct results from their expert systems, the AI hallucinations of it’s day.

Source: Symbolics, Inc.: A failure of heterogeneous engineering

Most accounts of the fall of Symbolics cite a lack of direction of the company and what they were solving. It was trying to be everything to everyone. This sounds eerily familiar.

If the trajectory of this AI hype cycle follows the prior hype cycles, there will be a reckoning from industry and government when executives finally realize they are not getting the promised return on their investments in AI technology and the promises made are just too lofty to support the reality on the ground.

AI comes along now during another cycle of stagflation as it did before in the 1980’s, possibly AI is a collective industry response to stagflation that we have yet to recognize.

As nice as it may sound to have a robot to do everything for you, if it does everything you could ever want it devolves into idiocracy and does not help lift up the human experience and achievement.