This is why, at Absentia, we treat consciousness as a distraction rather than a destination. We do not need our systems to be conscious for them to perform cognitive work at or beyond the human level, and conflating the two is a mistake, not an insight.

These worries are valid, but the bubble is not in AI as a whole. It is in one specific bet: that endlessly scaling a single giant language model (or thin wrappers around one) will somehow deliver artificial general intelligence, profitable products, and transformative economics. That bet is showing deep cracks. Recent research backs this up. A 2025 analysis found that transformer models hit a hard mathematical ceiling on creativity: they can only remix past data, and they can