New Delhi, Oct. 11 -- One evening, Bertie found himself in a well-worn leather chair at the Fat Cats Club. As regular readers know, our man is an old-school investor, which means he still believes in reading and prefers to do it from printed pages. Therefore, every so often, he stuffs his piled-up reading material into a cloth bag and makes his way to the Fat Cats library.

As Bertie adjusted his glasses and began skimming through his haul, he noticed how obsessed the global intelligentsia was with artificial intelligence (AI), and specifically with what would cause the AI bubble to burst. "This is like the railroads," argued one columnist, and then proceeded to make the case that the underlying technology, then and now, is revolutionary,...