The featured image of a Trumpville isn’t what most think of when they hear the phrase AI Apocalypse, but it is accurate. Hollywood wants to have images of robots slaughtering humans wholesale and self-driving cars mowing people down. For certain that would eventually come but it will be after The Great Trump Depression of 2026.
Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it
incorrectly attributed to george santayana
Groundwork Started with H-1B Visas
Corrupt MBAs started wholesale replacing American citizens with visa holders for pennies on the dollar. Despite the fact it was illegal to contract the visa holder out and legally the visa holder had to work at the office of their employer, they washed across the country like a plague. Firms “rented desks” at client sites and under that only a criminal could love it interpretation of “office of their employer” so they could wholesale replace Americans.
Oh, they still expected Americans to buy their products. Disney wholesale replaced U.S. Citizens with visa workers yet people still visit Disney parks and subscribe to their streaming service. You can’t really call yourself an American if you do either.
Hey, I’m not against visa workers coming over here for a better life. I’m against them being abused. I’m also against their only qualification being “priced right.”
Search the web and you can find numerous stories of student visa holders being relentlessly pursued by Indian consulting firms. The student isn’t even studying any IT field. They get force fed some over-used Java and web programming books to pass an online test for one skill and are sent to client locations to generate billable hours.
AI is the New H-1B
Unqualified but cheap.
That was the principal behind the plague of H-1B holders. In 2023 (and late 2022) we had the great visa worker purge. Financial analysts couldn’t figure out how all of the massive layoffs weren’t increasing unemployment numbers. Visa holders can’t collect unemployment.
Consumers and corporations got used to zero quality software. Software in America is like Russian manufacturing. People are shocked when something actually works.
Of course, AI programming is currently just as good as the unqualified H-1B code. Management didn’t take long to make a spreadsheet showing all of the money they could save replacing visa workers with a one time sunk cost AI product. Of course AI churns out shit code way faster than the visa workers who take two hour lunches. This has lead to high blast radius failures. Now it isn’t just one system, it is dozens and, thanks to the false methodology of Agile, you have no fallback position. Once installed, it has to stay installed. TDD said it worked!
Wrongly Focused on Layoffs
News media is wrongly focused on the layoffs. Yes, there may be a few U.S. Citizens in those numbers, but most of them will just be the last of the visa workers American didn’t need. Corporate America wanted cheap. There was no skills gap or IT worker shortage, ever. When you go to college to be purged of morals, ethics, and dignity, you come out as an MBA.
Yes, the layoffs will contribute to The Great Trump Depression of 2026 and beyond. They will cause the creation of Trumpvilles, wrongly called “tent encampments” today. You already see food pantries being overrun and you hear about the farmers who grow your food going out of business. Federal “bridge” money can’t save farmers from completely failed policy. We are about two years from not being able to feed America because nobody can afford to farm.
That’s not just some scare tactic. Sulfuric acid, used in everything from traditional car batteries to the manufacture of phosphate fertilizer, went from about $80 per ton to over $1000 per ton. We cannot have the yields we have without fertilizer and many other things that have increased exponentially. This year, any farmer that didn’t pre-apply fertilizer last fall is cutting way back or skipping fertilizer because you cannot eat a 5+ fold increase in input costs. You, my dear reader, are going to see American have a damned short crop, despite the fabricated numbers coming out of Washington.
Yes, those tractors take diesel which is now $6/gallon in may places.
Correct Focus – Brain Drain
Henry Ford made his own children start out in the mail room. It wasn’t punishment. It was so they could learn the business.
Kids coming out of IT programs are cock-sure of themselves. Sadly, they don’t know shit. You have to go through those junior positions. You have to be allowed to fail. No, Amazon and Microsoft aren’t role models. When you work for companies that process food, make medical devices, etc. you not only have to learn the business you have to learn the software development process.
Any major system of any importance will take years. Even if you buy a “canned” software package, the data migration from what you had and the fixing all of the shit they said would work out of the box will take years. It will take people who learned the business while learning the legitimate (not Agile) software development process.
AI can’t learn that. The AI Apocalypse happens when my generation dies off. Pretty much nobody under the age of 45 came up the hard way in IT. They’ve been connecting little pieces of Azure, AWS, and whatever Gartner Group was paid to market as an industry trend this week, hoping to God something actually works.
The AI Bomb Will Happen First – Inside Five Years
History is our teacher here.
The Dot-com circular investing era—characterized by hype-driven startups investing in one another to artificially inflate valuations—lasted approximately 5 years, building from 1995 to its peak in March 2000. [1, 2, 3]
What ai says
Having lived through DOT-BOMB while working on the trading floor system for a regional stock exchange, I can say they are about right. Traders were openly talking about NASDAQ hitting 800. Valley of the Boom really only touches on part of it. Pay particular attention to the Pink Slip Parties. And the streaming service that re-united The Who (spending its entire round of new funding doing it) for an Internet concert that nobody saw.
Basically none of the companies were “making money.” They were “trading services” and circular investing too cook the books. You will see a lot of familiar names, if you’re old enough, on this list of DOT-BOMB failures. It wasn’t called “circular investing” then, it was “in-kind transactions.” I don’t remember exactly which companies were in bed with who, but to paint a picture of how it might have worked
Lycos uses some hosting services from Geocities. In turn Geocities runs ads on Lycos. They both book a series of financial transactions that essentially wash. We are talking many millions of dollars. Many/most of the DOT-BOM era companies were engaged in this financial fraud. It juiced their numbers so stock price went up and they could get additional rounds of funding. There was no actual revenue.
Shocking Similarities
Pets.com, the Amazon of pet food. Went from IPO to bust in 268 days after losing $147 million in just nine months.
Gadzoox was today’s “data center craze.” It focused on storage and other services for DOT-BOMB companies. In 2000 it was valued at over $2 billion. In 2003 it went bust and was sold off to Broadcom.
Crypto isn’t new. Follow the above link and read up on Flooz.com. All of today’s crypto will eventually go bust for the same reasons. There is nothing behind it!
Today NVIDIA is leading the circular investing party. Circular investing moves more chips. Sheep are lead to slaughter chasing the ever increasing stock price believing the bubble won’t pop. AI data center bans are increasing around the country. Pretty soon those chip purchase commitments won’t be worth a roll of Charmin to wipe with.
Ultimately you cannot get around these self-evident truths
- Crypto isn’t green. Besides having nothing behind it, Crypto requires an excessive amount of electricity. Paper money, once printed, lasts for decades.
- AI isn’t green. Every consumer has had their electric bills skyrocket already due to AI and most of the data centers have yet to be built. Data centers use an ocean of potable water as well.
- Those few data centers generating their own electricity today have massive diesel engines turning generators. Gotta wonder how they like $6/gallon diesel now? Diesel is not a clean burning fuel.
- America doesn’t recycle nuclear waste. It currently has over 90,000 metric tons of nuclear waste stored on-site. Restarting and re-certifying closed nuclear plants isn’t really solving the ecological time bomb of their waste. All containers will eventually leak.
AI Bomb is Not the AI Apocalypse
After we have The Great Trump Depression of 2026 and beyond, we will have the AI Bomb. People with jobs throwing money into their retirement accounts is ultimately the sucker money propping up sky high AI and NVIDIA stock prices. Even if NVIDIA isn’t cooking the books like Enron, it will be remembered like Enron after the AI Bomb.
The AI Apocalypse happens not all that long after the AI BOMB.
MBAs, purged of morals, ethics, and dignity by virtue of their degree, cut every educational avenue of in their relentless personal greed. First they used unqualified H-1B workers. Then they replaced those with AI. The unqualified H-1Bs have been washing ashore en-mass since Obamma hosted tech companies grovelling for low wage workers. That was after they had already hit the excessive caps previously put in place. This means we are talking about wholesale replacement of college educated American IT workers with unqualified low wage visa workers for over 15 years (been 12 years since that meeting and it took them a few years to hit the cap).
Now we have AI wholesale replacing the visa workers.
Basically, as of today, there is nobody in IT who came up the hard way, learning both the business and how to properly develop software, under the age of 45, possibly nobody under the age of 50. You have to learn both of those via painful lessons before you can become an application architect. AI will never be the architect; AI cannot learn the business; AI can only learn the fake business models MBAs learn from text books.
AI cannot start in the mail room like Henry Ford’s son. It cannot learn why each piece of the business exists where it is, how it works, and how each piece integrates into a whole.
Nobody left alive will actually know how to design or develop anything. That’s the AI Apocalypse. Every MBA is going to say “Preserving that is the other guy’s problem! I’ve just got to make this quarter’s numbers!”
Now is a very good time for you to watch Logan’s Run.
