Finished reading: Boom by Byrne Hobart and Tobias Huber 📚
The book’s idea is that useful bubbles — characterized by irrational exuberance, shared optimism, and overinvestment — are important drivers of innovation (think of bubbles as things like the Apollo program and development of the microchip rather than purely financial delusions like the 2008 financial crisis). In that sense, the current AI bubble can be seen as useful because it’s concentrating huge amounts of R&D on a shared vision of the future. And just like the dot-com bubble popped but left behind the network infrastructure necessary for the Internet we rely upon today, the AI bubble may leave behind important software and computing paradigms even if Nvidia’s stock crashes.
Boom also has its weird and sometimes eye-roll-worthy moments. The first part of the book tries to explain that we’re currently mired in a Great Stagnation compared to the rapid developments of the mid-century. One of the things it blames for stagnation is the monoculture of university campuses — as if wokeness is to blame for a lack of innovation. The book ends with a philosophical and somewhat theological discussion of bubbles and progress that frankly didn’t land with me at all in audiobook format.
The middle stretch of the book is quite nice, though, as a survey of key technological developments in the last century and how a bubble-type environment brought them about.