Trickle down economics - the trick tycoons just can’t pull off.
The “bringing the jobs” stuff is insulting people into early graves, but the power consumption inequality may be what finishes off a lot of humans.
The CHIPS Act may result in products we actually need, if you want to continue to use computers, of course. And that’s the only reason to do “economic development” - to actually produce something humans need, or provide services humans need. There’s really no other reason for any business to exist, other than to actually provide things that humans need and want.
The people in power are going to endlessly try to trick us nevertheless about what the purpose of business is, and what we should think it is. But when they think nobody’s listening, they do say what’s up. I took the time to listen to this controversial talk given by billionaire tech tycoon Eric Schmidt. And just in case it wasn’t terribly obvious by now that “we’re giving you jobs” trickle down economics is not only pseudoscience, and not just insulting to our actual experience, but an actual trick – Well, here’s a tech tycoon basically spelling it out in a talk he didn’t realize was being recorded, describing how the CHIPS ACT was something AI tech tycoons essentially lobbied for, and that’s why this economic package passed.
Eric Schmidt: “I talked Sam Alman is a close friend he believes that it's going to take about 300 billion maybe more I pointed out to him that I done the calculation on the amount of energy Acquired and I and I then in the spirit of full disclosure went to the White House on Friday and told them that we need to become best friends with Canada because Canada has really nice people helped invent AI and lots of Hydra power because we as a country do not have enough power to do this the alternative is to have the Arabs fund it and I like the Arabs personally uh spent lots of time there right but they're not going to adhere to our national security rules whereas Canada and the US are part of a triumvirate it where we all agree.” Erik Brynjolfsson: “so these $300 billion data centers, electricity starts becoming the scarce resource.”
(...)
Eric Schmidt: “I was the chairman of an AI commission that sort of looked at this very carefully and um you can read it it's about 752 pages and I'll just summarize it by saying we're ahead we need to stay ahead and we need lots of money to do so our customers were the Senate and the House um and out of that came the chips act and a lot of other stuff like that.”
If only politicians were so responsive to people, we might have the luxuries of Europeans, like universal healthcare and sectoral union bargaining.
Meanwhile we have a power plant in Pennsylvania that provides no electricity to the community at all, it only exists to print cryptocurrency for a tycoon, and they want to burn tires to keep printing that crypto.
And whenever I have written to Bob Casey about AI seeming like a lot of scam garbage and the horrendous power issues involved with this industry, I’d repeatedly get this canned form response that referenced Turing Tests, and assuring me that tech tycoons had promised to make sure the products were safe without regulation.
Meanwhile people are eating poison mushrooms out of AI generated books sold on Amazon along side fake children’s books that make no sense, and people selling fake nonsense crochet patterns, and… some regulation progress has been made on fake testimonials.
Like so many tycoons and moguls, Eric Schmidt also has nonsense investor driven attitudes about allowing the rabble – such as software engineers and mathematicians – to work from home.
Eric Schmidt’s car crash Stanford interview showed big tech’s true colors on remote work - Big tech bigwigs just can’t come to terms with remote work – RTO mandates and battles with staff could be their undoing - By Ross Kelly - published August 23, 2024 While Schmidt has since backtracked on his comments, they nonetheless point toward an antiquated view of remote working culture that seems pervasive among both the old guard of Silicon Valley and a host of major organizations. The horse has well and truly bolted on strict in-office attendance – the pandemic saw to that – yet so many big tech firms are slugging it out in a war of attrition with staff to claw them back on-site. Google, Schmidt’s former stomping ground, is arguably among the best examples of a company trying by any means to get staff back into the very expensive real estate it needs to justify filling.
We all know by now that telework is demonized because fossil fuel companies want everyone commuting, and the owners of commercial real estate want companies renting expensive office space. It’s not uncommon where the owners of companies will be both the business operator and the landlord.
The investments of the 50 most wealthiest people on the planet must be really something.