Well, it seems the AI bubble’s nearing its end - the Financial Times has reported a recent dive in tech stocks, the mass media has fully soured on AI, and there’s murmurs that the hucksters are pivoting to quantum.
By my guess, this quantum bubble is going to fail to get off the ground - as I see it, the AI bubble has heavily crippled the tech industry’s ability to create or sustain new bubbles, for two main reasons.
No Social License
For the 2000s and much of the 2010s, tech enjoyed a robust social license to operate - even if they weren’t loved per se (e.g. Apple), they were still pretty widely accepted throughout society, and resistance to them was pretty much nonexistent.
Whilst it was starting to fall apart with the “techlash” of the 2020s, the AI bubble has taken what social license tech has had left and put it through the shredder.
Environmental catastrophe, art theft and plagiarism, destruction of livelihoods and corporate abuse, misinformation and enabling fascism, all of this (and so much more) has eviscerated acceptance of the tech industry as it currently stands, inspiring widespread resistance and revulsion against AI, and the tech industry at large.
For the quantum bubble, I expect it will face similar resistance/mockery right out of the gate, with the wider public refusing to entertain whatever spurious claims the hucksters make, and fighting any attempts by the hucksters to force quantum into their lives.
(For a more specific prediction, quantum’s alleged encryption-breaking abilities will likely inspire backlash, being taken as evidence the hucksters are fighting against Internet privacy.)
No Hypergrowth Markets
As Baldur Bjarnason has noted about tech industry valuations:
“Over the past few decades, tech companies have been priced based on their unprecedented massive year-on-year growth that has kept relatively steady through crises and bubble pops. As the thinking goes, if you have two companies—one tech, one not—with the same earnings, the tech company should have a higher value because its earnings are likely to grow faster than the not-tech company. In a regular year, the growth has been much faster.”
For a while, this has held - even as the hypergrowth markets dried up and tech rapidly enshittified near the end of the ‘10s, the gravy train has managed to keep rolling for tech.
That gravy train is set to slam right into a brick wall, however - between the obscenely high costs of both building and running LLMs (both upfront and ongoing), and the virtually nonexistent revenues those LLMs have provided (except for NVidia, who has made a killing in the shovel selling business), the AI bubble has burned billions upon billions of dollars on a product which is practically incapable of making a profit, and heavily embrittled the entire economy in the process.
Once the bubble finally bursts, it’ll gut the wider economy and much of the tech industry, savaging evaluations across the board and killing off tech’s hypergrowth story in the process.
For the quantum bubble, this will significantly complicate attempts to raise investor/venture capital, as the finance industry comes to view tech not as an easy and endless source of growth, but as either a mature, stable industry which won’t provide the runaway returns they’re looking for, or as an absolute money pit of an industry, one trapped deep in a malaise era and capable only of wiping out whatever money you put into it.
(As a quick addendum, it's my 25th birthday tomorrow - I finished this over the course of four hours and planned to release it tomorrow, but decided to post it tonight.)
Superdeterminism is literally just the idea that humans should be understood as quantum mechanical systems as well and thus should also be subjected to quantum mechanical laws. If those laws guarantee that the evolution of physical systems is such that certain correlations are always maintained, it then follows that a human should not be able to make the choice to break those correlations as they, too, are bound by physical laws, whereas the "free will" axiom states that we should assume humans are capable of making decisions that are statistically independent of any physical laws.
There is no good argument against the idea that human decisions should be considered to be dependent upon physical laws other than vague metaphysical arguments about how it is somehow the "end of science" and trying to perform huge mental gymnastics to equate it to a religious belief. None of these arguments are even relevant. Even if I were to concede entirely that somehow including the human experimenter within the physical description of the system would be an inconvenience for science... so? Do we just believe things that are convenient for us? That is not an argument.
It is sort of like Christians who try to use philosophy to "prove" God exists. That's just not how it works. Metaphysics never gets you to physics. You cannot demonstrate something is true about physical reality with a strong enough metaphysical argument. You need empirical evidence. If we are to rule out possibilities regarding the natural world, that would be because we have mathematical models which are empirically verified that disallow that possibility, not because of some vague metaphysical argument about how it wouldn't be convenient for us if it were true.
Any attempt to use metaphysics to make definite claims about what is or is not physically real is just entirely mistaken from the get-go.
Einstein also made the same exact argument but not against superdeterminism but against "spooky action." If two particles at a distance have no "awareness" of each other, then by mathematical necessity their behavior would have to be statistically independent of one another, and so entanglement would be impossible, but we know it's possible, the random values they take on are statistically dependent upon one another. If this is not due to a local signal, then it necessarily has to be nonlocal. Throwing out hidden variables doesn't get you out of this; the two particles at a distance have to be "aware" of each other nonlocally.
Einstein had also stated that nonlocality would be the end of science because the scientific method is driven by the ability to isolate phenomena, yet nonlocal phenomena is by necessity not isolatable. He also saw as essential to the scientific method that two statistically independent things do not become dependent upon one another unless it is through local interactions.
Anyone can make the argument that "X point of view destroys all of science." I mean, take the multiverse belief. If a medication has a 75% chance of curing people and 25% of failing, and nobody knows why, do you consider it "scientific" to just assert that maybe the universe splits into a vast multiverse where 75% of the branches the person is cured and 25% of the branches they are not whenever someone takes the medication? "But it's the simplest explanation: the branching is right there in the mathematics!"
That obviously is quite diametrically opposed to how we typically conceive of the scientific method, and we can give such an "answer" to any mystery. Yet, supposedly I am supposed to take that kind of "answer" more seriously than just suggesting that humans are quantum mechanical systems too?
None of these kinds of arguments are particularly convincing, but we can make one from all sides. Anyone who supports any interpretation can argue that the assumptions being abandoned in the other interpretations are a detriment to the scientific method.
No, that's not what superdeterminism is. You are importing a whole lot of baggage about what it means to understand things "as quantum mechanical systems". You are also making the same mistake that Tim Maudlin does about the implications of Bell inequality violations. He thinks that the EPR criterion of reality is "analytically" true, and he's wrong. Since you have recommended Maudlin elsewhere on Lemmy (as well as promulgating the myth that a singular "Copenhagen interpretation" exists), I'm going to do something else than try conversing with you further.