The AI ‘new era’ illusion: why every boom looks different—but ends the same

The beginning of the 20th century, much like the beginning of the 21st, was an era of increasing optimism. The financial panics of 1873 and 1893 were in the past, new technologies like electricity and internal combustion were just gaining traction and Morganization was creating trusts insulated from the ravages of competition. The financial journalist Alexander Dana Noyes wrote at the time that the market “based its ideas and conduct on the assumption that we were living in a New Era; t...