That's not what the author is arguing, he's simply stating that a main driver of this tech cycle - matching platforms for the sharing of private assets such as Uber and AirBnB - is running into problems, with appetite decreasing in public markets for companies that show (slowing) user growth with no clear path to profitability. A valid point.

What remains to be seen is the second claim - "the fantasy that AI and machine learning will generate trillions in profits"

While I tend to agree that ML/AI are generally deployed to save costs rather than increase revenue and create totally new categories of products, there are definitely still a lot of brownfield opportunities in legacy tech for data scientists to tackle and automate

This also ignores the huge opportunity for cloud service providers to take compute-as-a-service business from legacy on-prem/datacenter biz as well

But I would challenge you to think outside the sarcastic box and propose what you see as a few of the main technological drivers of productivity growth that are currently popping up in tech

What really needs to be answered here is why you suddenly stopped putting periods at the end of your sentences after your first paragraph.

On a more serious note, if you're genuinely interested, just take a look at my historical posts/comments on HN. I post all the interesting articles I see from my personal feed on here.

Think of all the parts of the world which are still not covered in automatically placed ads! There's so much opportunity.