Amazon.com Inc. founder Jeff Bezos has argued that the huge surge of investment in artificial intelligence is fuelling a “good” kind of bubble, delivering lasting benefits for society even if share prices collapse as dramatically as his ecommerce company’s did 25 years ago.

“This is kind of an industrial bubble as opposed to financial bubbles,” Bezos said at a tech conference in Turin on Friday, drawing parallels with the dotcom-era investment in fibre-optic cable that outlasted many of the companies who deployed it and the “life-saving drugs” that emerged from the 1990s biotech boom and bust.

“The banking bubble, the crisis in the banking system, that’s just bad, that’s like 2008. Those bubbles society wants to avoid,” he said.

“The ones that are industrial are not nearly as bad, they can even be good. Because when the dust settles and you see who are the winners — society benefits from those inventions,” he continued. “That’s what is going to happen here too. This is real. The benefits to society from AI are going to be gigantic.” [...]