On the campaign trail and since election night, Trump has vowed to impose significant tariffs on some of the nation’s largest trading partners, which will make things more expensive for the American consumer. Trump’s mass deportation plans could cause economic chaos if carried out at enough scale, particularly in the agriculture and construction sectors. His administration’s plans to disrupt and dismantle the federal bureaucracy could take a toll as well.
Two separate but related industries exemplify what some have called the “bullshit economy.” The American Prospect’s David Dayen memorably wrote about it after Iowa Democrats paid a curiously well-connected tech company to develop an unnecessary app called Shadow to more speedily report the results of the 2020 caucus. When the app crashed on caucus night, bedlam followed, and it took longer to find out the results than if they’d done it the old-fashioned way.
Two examples exemplify this trend. One of them is “crypto,” a term that now encompasses cryptocurrencies, blockchains, NFTs, and so on. Until recently it has been a grim time in the crypto world. In my 2022 retrospective column, I described crypto as the “boondoggle of the year,” partly because many of its highest-profile figures and companies had collapsed or been disgraced, with ruinous consequences for their customers and employees, and partly because “boondoggle” is a great word that I rarely get to use.
Instead, crypto’s survival has come through betraying its original ambitions. Crypto advocates have been correct about one thing over the years: The United States dollar, like nearly all modern currencies, is a fiat medium of exchange that is intrinsically vulnerable to inflation, deflation, and other forms of government manipulation. By unmooring itself from government control, the original, Great Recession–era creators of cryptocurrencies hoped to create an alternative to the dollar that would benefit ordinary people instead of banks and politicians.
What do they expect to get in return for these campaign donations? A more favorable regulatory and law enforcement environment, for one thing. Leading crypto figures know that all those pesky regulators and investigators in Washington—the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, the Justice Department, and so on—could bring their party to an end. Trump has even pledged to make the U.S. a “Bitcoin superpower,” whatever that means. For now, it means installing pro-crypto figures atop the SEC and other key agencies.
The crypto industry’s greater ambition may be to get the federal government—and, by extension, all Americans—to be the ultimate bag-holder by directly buying cryptocurrencies with taxpayer dollars. Wyoming Senator Cynthia Lummis, one of the industry’s leading allies, introduced a bill this summer titled the Boosting Innovation, Technology, and Competitiveness through Optimized Investment Nationwide Act of 2024, or Bitcoin Act of 2024. (I’ve previously given my thoughts on acronym bills.)
This is a dream scenario for early crypto adopters and no one else. Forget trying to time the market’s peak before people inevitably catch on to crypto’s weaknesses or they fall into an unfavorable regulatory environment. They can simply unload all these unproductive, intangible, nonfungible, and inexplicably expensive assets onto the federal government of the United States and get real money for them in return. Lummis described it as “our Louisiana Purchase moment,” but that only makes sense if we’re the French.
One of AI’s fundamental flaws is that it “hallucinates,” the term used by developers for when it gives wrong information based on its corpus of accurate information. Lawyers who use ChatGPT to research precedents for a lawsuit have been sanctioned for giving fake case citations in court. BBC News criticized Apple this month after the tech giant’s AI software incorrectly summarized its news articles to say that the UnitedHealthcare CEO murder suspect had shot himself.
The other problem is that people are mistaking existing AI products for actual artificial intelligence and using them in self-destructive ways. Even if one assumes AI will someday play a positive role in society, that day is not today. Major companies are stumbling over each other to launch AI-driven products and AI-connected services with little care for what consumers want or desire. When Apple added Apple Intelligence to its newest phones, most users reportedly found it largely useless.
Some of Andreessen’s points have merit. He is skeptical of the claims from some AI critics—and even a few of its enthusiasts—that AI could present some sort of extinction-level threat to humanity, dismissing them as either flawed misunderstandings of the technology or self-interested promotions by its boosters. (His ally Elon Musk, another AI hype enthusiast, is sometimes guilty of this.)
“The idea ...
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( How the Silicon Valley Robber Barons’ New Tech Bubble Won 2024 )
Also on site :