The question isn’t whether the AI bubble will burst – but what the fallout will be

Will the bubble ravage the economy when it bursts? What will it leave of value once it pops?

The California Gold Rush left an outsized imprint on America. Some 300,000 people flocked there from 1848 to 1855, from as far away as the Ottoman Empire. Prospectors massacred Indigenous people to take the gold from their lands in the Sierra Nevada mountains. And they boosted the economies of nearby states and faraway countries from whence they bought their supplies.

Gold provided the motivation for California - a former Mexican territory then controlled by the US military - to become a state with laws of its own. And yet, few 49ers" as prospectors were known, struck it rich. It was the merchants selling prospectors food and shovels who made the money. One, a Bavarian immigrant named Levi Strauss who sold denim overalls to the gold bugs passing through San Francisco, may be the most remembered figure of his day.