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Comment by tjr | Hacker News Reader

I doubt it will ever fly in the US given how strongly the US economy relies on AI.

How strongly is that? Would it really be that catastrophic to return all business processes to as they were in, say, 2022?

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You're talking about wiping hundreds of billions of market cap from Nvidia/Google/OpenAI/Anthropic/Amazon/Meta etc, and also the loss of a very large number of tech jobs. It's hard to imagine any country volunteering to wound its own economy so severely.

> It's hard to imagine any country volunteering to wound its own economy so severely.

Yeah, imagine shutting down all the basic research that has driven the economy for the last 75 years, in a matter of months. Crazy. Nobody would do that.

Did the AI company tech workers get summoned into existence in 2023? Would they not have most likely been working somewhere else?

And what about jobs lost (or never created) due to AI itself?

Would not Google/Amazon/Meta have continued on to advance their product lines and make new products, even if not AI? Would not other new non-AI companies have been created?

I'm not convinced that the two options are, "everything as it is right now", or, "the entire economy is collapsed".

It's the fact that the majority of the growth in US economy is based on AI. When the AI bubble bursts, the economy will not look so good. It's what's hiding all of the turmoil the rest of the economy is suffering based on recent changes from current administration

Yes: "What makes the current situation distinctive is that AI appears to be propping up something like the entire U.S. economy. More than half of the growth of the S&P 500 since 2023 has come from just seven companies: Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla."

https://www.theatlantic.com/economy/archive/2025/09/ai-bubbl...

That's not really “AI propping up the entire US economy” so much as it is the AI bubble overlapping with and (very temporarily, likely) masking, in aggregate terms, a general recession. If AI was actually propping up the broader economy, then it would be supporting other industries and the gains wouldn’t be hyperconcentrated and isolated to a small number of AI firms and their main compute hardware supplier.

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