Low battery: Technology seems to be running out of steam.
Technology has less and less to offer us these days. That's why the tech industry is so terribly broken.
Last weekend I wrote an article, the longest one that’s ever appeared here on the Garden, about the deeply sick AI industry, why the technology itself is largely useless and why I think it’s mostly a pump-and-dump scam. The economic bubble caused by AI in which our society and economy finds itself right now is obviously a big story, but it’s not the whole story. The AI scam is merely a symptom of a broader problem, and that’s what I want to talk about today. The problem is that the tech industry, and perhaps the phenomenon of technological innovation in general, seem to be slowing down and running out of steam. Given the reliance we’ve placed on technology in our culture, economic and political systems, a major slowdown in innovation—and the potential end or significant curtailment of the tech industry—could represent a major sea change in modern history.
The problem has both short-horizon and macro-level dimensions. Let’s start with the short horizon first, and that involves the tech industry, or “Big Tech,” which is the sector heavily invested in AI. Although I mentioned it in my AI article, it’s worth hitting harder. Has anyone noticed that the people who are most all-in on AI, funneling the most money into it and inflating it in the press and public consciousness as the “next big thing” that will “change everything,” are the same people that pumped up useless crap like Mark Zuckerberg’s “metaverse,” or cryptocurrency and the blockchain? Venture capitalists, for example, who are today pumping money via fire hoses into fraudulent companies like OpenAI, funded cryptocurrency scams to the tune of $41 billion in 2021-22. The metaverse sucked up $120 billion in 2022. Now we’re told by the same gullible tech reporters, industry promoters, carnival barkers and investment advisers that AI is going to be everywhere, do everything, and turn us into the Borg from Star Trek. Just as there’s no “there” there in AI, there wasn’t in the metaverse or cryptocurrency either. But this is what Big Tech has been spending its time, and scads of its investors’ money, on for the last two years or so.
