When is a Bubble Not a Bubble‪?‬ That Was The Week

Contents
Editorial: When is a Bubble not a Bubble?
Essays of the Week
The great rewiring: is social media really behind an epidemic of teenage mental illness?
The Day the Music Lied
Weapons of Mass Production
China’s future economy
This Message Will Self-Destruct in 33 Seconds
1 in 6 People Will Be Aged 65+ by 2050
Venture Investing This Week
Global Venture Funding In Q1 2024 Shows Startup Investors Remain Cautious
First Cut - State of Private Markets: Q4 2023
The Investments Where I’m Going to Lose All My Money
Quant VC and What it Means for Startup Investing
Video of the Week
New Apple Vision Pro Personas
AI of the Week
Meet the YC Winter 2024 Batch
The 18 most interesting startups from YC’s Demo Day show we’re in an AI bubble
YCombinator's AI boom is still going strong (W24)
Bubble Trouble
Big Tech companies form new consortium to allay fears of AI job takeovers
News Of the Week
Apple Vision Pro’s Persona feature gets collaborative
Jon Stewart Plunges the Knife into Apple
Startup of the Week
Rubrik’s IPO filing hints at thawing public markets for tech companies
X of the Week
Mike Maples on Y Combinator
Editorial
I’ve taken to writing this on Friday morning. I put the curated content together Thursday evening, which gives me overnight to reflect. Usually, the title comes first and is somehow correlated to the content below.
This week, there is a lot about AI. The Y Combinator story in AI of the week is the story that the “bubble” will be challenged due to a lack of training data. In contrast, the story is that AI will remove so many jobs that the larger companies have formed a consortium to allay fears.
I also created a new section separating out Venture Capital. This is the week of quarterly updates from Q1. They suggest there is no bubble at all. Only Amazon’s multi-billion dollar investment in Anthropic stands out.
But for me, the question posed in the title is - When is a Bubble not a Bubble? - is not triggered by the AI stories. The Economist’s Simon Cox writes about China and its future in a newsletter and the linked article. He frames it well:
In 2006, for example, China’s leaders declared the need to “rely more than ever on scientific and technological progress and innovation to drive a qualitative leap in productivity”. Science and technology, they added, are “the concentrated embodiment…of advanced productive forces”. That ambition, and indeed that diction, sound very similar to the slogans emanating from Beijing today. Xi Jinping, China’s leader, has, for example, urged provincial governments to cultivate “new productive forces”, based on science and technology. In this week’s issue I explore what those words might mean.
As Simon points out, “productive forces” is a formulation derived from Hegel and Marx. It combines technology and human beings into a duality that expresses how we produce things. Indeed, there is no pure “technology” separate from human beings and the division of labor. Productivity is the expression of both and the measurable thing.
In the Western enlightenment tradition, we use the word progress to mean the same thing.
All progress requires humans to invent time-saving methods to reduce the effort involved in making and doing things.
China’s discussion (especially if you remove the word China) is about building the future through innovation. It stands in contrast to the dominant discussions here in the US - Regulation, the dangers of Social Media, Immigration, Women’s Right to Choose, Guns, and even Climate. And a lot of pessimism around technology and science.
That is except for in the startup ecosystem. The dominant Silicon Valley belief system is similar to Simon Cox’s description of China’s goals.
Accelerated Innovation dominates the set of assumptions in the Bay Area. Why? Because AI, Nuclear Fusion, Decentralized Networks, Global Ambition, and the skills and money they require all live here. And their potential is real. And the