The Bogeyman and the Railway: Why the AI Bubble is the Wrong Conversation

On November 30th, 2022, the world met ChatGPT, and the rhetoric was immediate: The Bogeyman has arrived.

The big players jumped on the bandwagon with a singular, terrifying message: It’s coming to get you. It was coming for your job, your creative works, your "stuff," and eventually, your very humanity. We were told we were "all doomed."

I remember talking to the "proper geeks" about this, not the guys with graphic design degrees, but the Oxford and Cambridge PhDs in Mathematics and Computer Science. Twelve years ago, they were already prophesying a jobless future where we’d all live on Universal Basic Income and spend our days wearing goggles in Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse.

They had the math; they had the logic. But they didn't have the human element.

The "Goggles" Moment

Fast-forward to early 2026, and the disconnect is glaring. We don’t want to live in the Metaverse. We don’t want glasses or goggles thinking for us. We are mortals; we like the real world.

Yet, the tech elite hasn't learned. Last week, Elon Musk announced he is essentially killing off the iconic Tesla Model S and Model X to pivot the company toward "Optimus" robots. He’s quoted saying:

“I think everyone will want to have their personal robot... like your own personal C-3PO.”

He’s betting the farm on a future where we all want a humanoid machine to watch our kids and fold our laundry.

It’s the ultimate "Proper Geek" move: building a high-tech solution for a life people haven't asked for. While Elon dreams of robots, the tech he actually sold us—the self-driving car—is under federal investigation after a Waymo struck a child in Santa Monica last week.

When a machine makes a mistake in the real world, "all hell breaks loose," and no amount of PhD logic can fix the trust that is broken with it.

The Invisible Railway

Because of these high-profile disconnects, people love to talk about the "AI Bubble." They see the "circular funding"—where NVIDIA, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Oracle essentially pass the same twenty-dollar bill around in a circle to inflate their balance sheets—and they assume the whole thing is a house of cards.

They are missing the point.

I don't see this circular funding as a bubble; I see it as the essential, messy "build phase" of an infrastructure. Saying AI is a bubble is like looking at the Railway Mania of the 1840s and saying the steam engine was a fad because investors lost their shirts.

The investors failed, but the tracks stayed in the ground. The stations were built.

Right now, we are building a digital railway, and we can’t lay the tracks fast enough. There are 800 million daily users on ChatGPT alone.

That is a "Facebook moment." When you have that many people integrated into a service, the utility is real, even if the accounting is circular.

The Power Wall

The real "backup" isn't financial, it’s physical. We are hitting a wall because we cannot build the infrastructure quickly enough for the demand.

Our 1970s power grid is being asked to sustain a 2026 world in which a single AI query consumes ten times the power of a Google search.

We are building the engines, but we haven't finished the "stations" (the power plants and data centres) to keep them running.

The Shape of Utility

The geeks and the headlines are looking for C-3PO, but the revolution is much quieter. I use AI every day, often for hours at a time. I don't use it because I want a robot in my house; I use it to shape my ideas and refine my writing.

The rhetoric has changed because the "Singularity" didn’t show up on time.

The Bogeyman turned out to be a buggy, power-hungry, incredibly useful tool.

We’re not all doomed; we’re just all busy laying tracks.

The geeks might have been wrong about the goggles, but they were right about one thing: we’re never going back to the way things were before the train arrived.