And let us all not forget, @cstross — that the "dot-com" bubble was caused by overly eager investment in the World Wide Web which was, nevertheless, useful ultimately. It was an object lesson in how dangerous unchecked speculation can be even if the speculation was arguably not that far off the mark. The lesson to be learned from that bubble was about market misbehaviour and not about the technology underlying it.

Two facts are apparent: that the shareholder-types never learned their lesson and, independently, that AI is in no objective sense equivalently transformative when one considers how the 'Web ultimately changed the world.

Today's bubble is repeating the unchecked speculation, reproducing the problematic market concentration and demonstrating the same misbehaviour and rampant, unfounded bullishness but also basing it all on a gimmick that has yet to prove a single valid use-case beyond gimmickry.

And certainly nothing even comparable to the impact of a global, near-instant communication medium.