All tomorrow’s parties. — Ethan Marcotte

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Let’s review.

Token costs are rising. In response, Meta and Amazon have shut down their internal “artificial intelligence” leaderboards; Microsoft has pushed its employees toward Copilot, and away from Claude Code’s rising costs. Uber has already capped its usage of LLMs internally, setting a monthly cap for every employee’s token spending. All of this is happening against the backdrop of the biggest “AI” platforms still borrowing money against hypothetical future returns, and markets are becoming increasingly skittish over America’s big, all-encompassing bet on LLMs. And according to reports from NOTUS and Reuters, major “AI” providers are already having discussions with the United States government, in which they’re laying the groundwork for “too big to fail”-style bailouts.

This is all fine, of course. Totally fine, and great.

I’ve noted before that the so-called “AI” industry is not built on a sound financial foundation. 1 But in the last few weeks, it feels like new, even worse stress fractures have been racing across that foundation. And it’s been hard not to wonder what will happen next.

What will happen next?

I must admit I feel cursed by this stupid question. Why do we even ask it? I mean, look: my endocrine system is evolutionarily hardwired to worry about unseen threats. Something buried deep in my subconscious still thinks alpha predators lurk around every street corner, waiting to snack on my kidneys. “Something terrible is about to happen,” my hindbrain insists. “Look at the evidence before you. Anticipate. Prepare for the unseen danger,” it whines. “Shut up,” I hiss back, “I am basically a fancy typist with bad eyesight, there are no cheetahs lurking in the tall grass, I do not need this much cortisol.”

But professionally? Working in tech, we’re expected to care about this question. We’re supposed to have educated opinions about the future, to have some idea of what will happen next, all so that we can better plan for it. To design and build something that’ll last.

And I don’t know about you, but whenever I’ve been asked that question — “what’s going to happen next?” — it has changed its shape. When I first started talking about responsive design, I’d get asked to weigh in on the future of mobile, or what the then-explosive levels of device diversity might look like in a few years’ time. A few years after that, I started getting questions about automated website builders, and how they might change design.

I can’t see the future, but I can state a blindingly obvious thing. None of these are questions about technology. These are all questions about work: what it might look like in the future and, most importantly, whether or not the person asking will even have a place in that future. That’s the real question behind the question, and it’s always tinged with worry or fear. And now, with hundreds of thousands of tech workers having lost their jobs since ChatGPT was released, there are a lot more of us asking the question. All of us would very, very, very much like to know what happens next.

I have no answers here. But two things come to mind.

Here’s the first one.

What will happen next?

When I’m asked about where “AI” might be going, I don’t think about the terrifyingly large bubble that’s (possibly? probably? definitely?) about to pop; I don’t think of the careers, lives, and futures that will be upended by that “market correction”; I don’t think about the potential after a crash for these big, lumbering, literally-world-devouring centralized platforms to be replaced by smaller local models. 2 Instead, when I hear that question these days — what will happen next? — I think about William Gibson and plastics.

“And these guys were very common,” [Gibson] went on, taking down a small plastic spaceman: red, wearing an elaborately earmuffed helmet with an antenna on top. “These spacemen were dime-store toys at a time — which I can actually remember! — when cheap plastics were still weirdly novel. Like Gore-Tex or something. You’d ask, ‘What is it made of?’ ” He looked wistful, then thoughtful. “I’ve decided that one of the most significant things I ever saw in my life was the arrival of completely ubiquitous injection-molded plastics. I was certainly aware of them as the onset of something new. They cost practically nothing. But no one had any idea what a disaster we were all witnessing. Now the oceans are full of it.” He handed the spaceman to me. I hefted it, weightless, in my palm — an antique bit of misread future.

I’ve seen Gibson use this line in a few interviews. And when he does, he’s occasionally mentioned how he can browse through old photographs, and see all the toys he was raised on: crafted little objects made of cloth, wood, tin, even paper. But after a certain point, it’s like a switch gets flipped — and...