Megan McCarty Carino

The Federal Communications Commission estimated that by 2007, about two-thirds of the 45 million miles of fiber cables were still unused.

But years later, that fiber infrastructure supported streaming, social media, and now AI.

How would you describe what you saw in terms of how we ended up with, you know, this fiber glut?

And does it relate to our present world?

Yeah, even if in the short term it was too much than they could recoup, ultimately we used it for all kinds of things.

And that's what today's AI companies are betting a whole lot on.

I'm Megan McCarty Carino for Marketplace.

Giving the AI boom a bubble score.

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Megan McCarty Carino.

Is AI a bubble?

It's the trillion-dollar question in the economy.

So we decided to look to history for some answers.

David A. Kirsch is a historian and management professor at the University of Maryland.

He co-authored the book Bubbles and Crashes, the Boom and Bust of Technological Innovation.

He looked at patterns over 150 years of technological breakthroughs, from broadcast radio to rayon, and came up with a model of the conditions that most often lead to bubbles.

You have focused on bubbles that kind of bubble up around technological innovations, but some of the best-known bubbles in history have formed around things that aren't techie at all, you know, tulip mania, of course, the housing bubble.

But are technological innovations kind of especially prone to bubble dynamics?

What role has infrastructure played historically in these tech booms and busts?

When you look at your criteria for kind of the conditions of bubbles, how does AI, the AI boom, line up with that?