Over the last year my money has driven me slightly batty.
This trip to the Netherlands, which I saw as the ultimate splurge of my life, didn’t make a dent in my retirement account. I always put money away but as I prepare to head home, the level of savings still boggles the mind.
If that’s happening to small investors, what’s going on with Jeff Bezos?
Wealth can make you crazy, and the more wealth you have the crazier you can become. This is especially true for stock market wealth, which is just figures on a screen, the number of shares you own multiplied by what was paid for the last one. It is ephemeral, unreal. The latest bear market should have convinced everyone of that. In that respect it failed.
The chosen of Silicon Valley are strapped to a rocket ship of wealth, destination unknown, and they can’t get off. Bezos keeps selling stock, keeps turning it into luxury, keeps building literal rocket ships, yet he’s richer than ever. Can you even conceive of $100 billion, let alone the $203 billion he’s worth today?
Tech’s wealth has pulled other stock wealth along for the ride. The three Walton kids, who did nothing other than be born, are each worth over $100 billion. One of the grandkids is worth $40 billion.
The wealth of tech spills into every corner of the market, into every corner of the world. Most of the ultra-wealthy are just along for the ride.
Hunger in The Great Game
What I called last year The Great Game of AI has yet to build great fortunes for the players. Mosaic creator Marc Andreessen, now a venture capitalist, is worth less than $2 billion. He probably feels a little poor. Sam Altman of ChatGPT is worth just $1.5 billion. He’s not even on the main Forbes list.
To keep the game going, the masters of AI must keep the hype of AGI alive. The music must keep playing so that they can get theirs, along with their followers, and their followers’ followers. There’s literally no end to the hunger of tech entrepreneurs for more wealth.
How do you justify that hunger? That’s what religion is for, isn’t it? That’s what politics is for, isn’t it?
But once salvation is assured and power is seized, what then?
It turns out that rich men aren’t very different from young madrasa students. They’re easily seduced by claims of a higher authority, by the idea of an ending, by the false claims of “once and for all,” by “happily ever after.” They’re looking for a plot that will end the story, end the game, end their pain.
Too bad the world isn’t like that.
Where It All Ends
To justify itself, its wealth, and its continuing demand for market cap, AI has made promises it can’t keep. It’s making us all crazy.
The idea that Artificial General Intelligence and robotics will replace people, leaving us with nothing to do, is insane. There are still billions of people in grinding poverty. The climate is still spinning out of control. Small children are still dying of dread diseases.
There is always more to do.
The promise of AGI can’t be met, even when it is met. AGI will be a tool, just like my first Kaypro PC was a tool, for making life better, for getting more done. I look at how good life is in the Netherlands right now and I’m convinced it can be that way elsewhere.
At the same time, it’s obvious that a market crash is coming, bigger than the 2000’s dot bomb or the Great Recession of the 2010s. I can’t see any place to hide from it. Cash won’t work because the dollar is just another asset class. Land won’t work for the same reason. All wealth is being held up now by the false promises of AGI. When those promises fail, as they inevitably will, we’ll just have to pick up the pieces and move on. As we’ve done countless times already.
What Comes Next
In my 70 years I’ve witnessed what now seem like a constant string of busts. The 1973 oil crisis crashed real estate for 10 years. The oil bust of 1981 left cities like Houston desolate for most of a decade. The stock market crashed in 1987 after the savings and loan bust. The dot bomb left me earning no money at all for two years in the 2000s. The Great Recession left us all poorer for half a decade. COVID destroyed stock values. We’ve already seen a tech wreck in just this decade, in 2022.
This next bust will do the same things to AGI that previous busts did to previous dreams. It will bring new faces and new movements to the fore. There will be Chinese faces, Indian faces, Malaysian faces, maybe some American and European faces. But they will be new faces, making new promises, piling wealth in new Aladdin’s caves. As they’re doing today.
Today’s wealth, and today’s ultra wealthy, will be forgotten. That’s what really drives them crazy.
