The wrong type of circular economy

If you perceive tears of rage they're due to a new source of frustration: the squandering of wealth and resources in the unregulated AI quest

- Dick Pountain

Is it just me, or does it feel as though we're currently living in a peculiar sort of limbo? Deep down we all know that AI is bound to end in tears, with the only questions that remain concerning from whose eyes, whether they're caused by economics, politics or ecology, and whether they're of rage or hilarity. (On that point, I'm guiltily amused by the cruel wag on Substack who suggested we should start calling Sam Altman “Sloppenheimer”.)

I'm acutely aware of the amount of space I've devoted in this column, over many years, to expressing scepticism about the strongest claims made by the AI crowd, and I don't wish to bang on about those same arguments. Fortunately, I've found a new one to bang on about.

Of course, living in the world of Einsteinian spacetime as I must, it's quite possible that an upsetting event might occur in the period between me typing this and it appearing in PC Pro. I'm typing it on 6 February 2026, and Nvidia has just announced it's only going to “lend” OpenAI $20 billion instead of the $100 billion Altman asked for. Were this to bring down the company by disrupting its bizarre circular funding model (“I lend you the money to buy my products and charge you for them”) that might trigger a chain of crashes that will answer the economic question. Perhaps I'll be practising a new guitar arrangement of “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?”.