Capture.
I led my predictions for 2025 with the dog-bites-man observation that technology has eclipsed finance as the most powerful industry in the world. More than six months into the year, I’d like to emend my conclusion. Tech hasn’t eclipsed finance. It has captured it.
Finance has always leveraged technology – at Wired in the early 1990s, we were fond of saying that technology’s twin engines of innovation were money and sex – but the most interesting story was always money. Care to understand the future of internet infrastructure? Bone up on how hedge funds optimize network latency. Want to peer into the future of online consumer services back when the Web was a glint in Marc Andreessen’s eye? Start with online banking.
But in the past few years, the bit has flipped. Technology is no longer a mere enabler of finance. Thanks in large part to society’s rapturous embrace of AI, technology has absorbed the finance industry, adopting its amorality and its rapacious appetite for risk. Capital has become tech’s hand maiden, financing an endless stream of audacious bets: Half a trillion for AI server farms? Let’s do it twice! A $2 billion seed round for a company with no product? Probably undervalued! Abandoning your values to access autocratic blood money? Everyone else is doing it, why not us!?
Hubris.
Technologists have always suffered from hubris. For a few decades, that was OK – you could poke fun at breathless coverage of digital hippies or the dog walking app that raised $300 million only to file Chapter 11 a few years later. And you could roll your eyes at a real estate con dressed up as a world-changing economic force for good. But today’s AI industry? Hubris seems too light a word.
The word hubris comes from the Greek for “a serious offense against the gods and the natural order.” Its modern usage evokes downfall – “extreme or excessive pride or dangerous overconfidence and complacency, often in combination with (or synonymous with) arrogance.”
Keep that definition in mind while we review the news over the past week or so:
- It’s AI week in Washington DC, a town famously driven by power, money, and hubris. And OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has a message for Our Dear Leader: Bad guys with bad AI are willing to spend “an enormous amount of money” to overtake our beloved democracy. The only protection we have? Companies like OpenAI. So for the love of (God? Money? Power?), leave us alone to do (God’s? Money’s? Power’s?) work! Everything we hold dear depends on it, don’t you see? Copy that, the administration announced today. We got you.
- OpenAI’s products are “the greatest source of empowerment for all” ever created, according to the company’s incoming CEO of Applications Fidji Simo. In an essay explaining her move from Instacart (boring, old school!), Simo recounts the tech industry’s de facto religious canon: AI will conquer every single problem known to humanity, including healthcare, economic opportunity, creative fulfillment, and …. time itself! Sounds great! Never mind that AI doesn’t really work as advertised. It will!
- As Axios puts it this week: “AI makers are getting everything they have ever asked for or could possibly want.” Buried in that story is a line worth repeating: AI makers liken the process of training models to raising children. If that’s true, the technology is growing up as a fabulously rich kid in a wildly permissive household. Remind you of anyone?
- In a leaked memo, former industry good guy and Anthropic CEO Dario Amoedi explains why he’s now open to accepting “blood money” from autocratic sources. In short: Everyone else is already doing it. “There is a truly giant amount of capital in the Middle East, easily $100B or more,” he writes, clearly earmarking that $100 billion for Anthropic alone. “If we want to stay on the frontier, we gain a very large benefit from having access to this capital. Without it, it is substantially harder to stay on the frontier.”
Data.
Where, exactly, is this frontier bringing us? As far as I can tell, it’s (a lot) more of the same. If anything about how the technology industry has behaved over the past 20 years gives you pause, well, it’s about to get several orders of magnitude worse. The most powerful industry in human history now has access to unlimited resources, unlimited political power, and an unlimited remit to “change the world.” But the business model it’s employing to get there? Same as it ever was.
Have you read OpenAI’s privacy policies? I have. At its core, it’s the same bargain we already have with the tech industry. Scholar Shoshana Zuboff calls it surveillance capitalism. Author Cory Doctorow calls it “enshittification.” It follows a simple formula:
We give you a service. You give us your data. We use that data to lock you in. Then we rent seek for as long as we possibly can.
We’re about to be nostalgic for the time when “our data” meant simply our name, our search and browsing history, our location, and what we bought on Amazon. As I’ve said over and over, the database of our intentions keeps expanding, and it now includes our increasingly unhinged conversations with AI agents.
How large is that last category? Axios reports this week that 500 million weekly active ChatGPT users “send more than 2.5 billion prompts each day globally.” This figure is already too large to comprehend, and it’s growing faster than any product in the history of digital technology. We are literally flooding the AI industry with our deepest fears, hopes, wants and dreams. What do we expect they’ll do with them?
If you don’t think OpenAI (and the rest of the AI industrial complex) plans on using that data to lock you into using its services, not to mention delivering increasingly intrusive advertising, well, as I said last week, you’re asleep.
Faust.
Perhaps, as many in the tech industry argue, we truly are at an inflection point in human history, and we’re building a new society based on entirely novel cultural norms and values that will usher in a time of prosperity, equality, and justice. Perhaps the techno-utopia we dreamt of in the early years of the Internet is just around the corner. Perhaps Sam Altman, Marc Andreessen, Peter Theil, JD Vance, and Elon Musk will take us there.
Perhaps. But our society’s bargain with the men behind AI remind me of the centuries old tale of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, later retold as an epic poem by Goethe, perhaps Germany’s most revered literary figure. In both versions, Doctor Faustus is bored with humanity’s limitations and seeks the omnipotence of unlimited knowledge and endless worldly pleasures. He strikes a deal with the devil, and for a period of 24 years, is granted his wish. In Marlowe’s telling of the story, Faustus must face the consequences of his bargain. At the end of his life, he is summarily dragged off to Hell. But in Goethe’s version, Faustus gets a mulligan. He repents and is granted entry into Heaven.
I get the sense that Goethe’s version of the tale underpins our current relationship with AI. No need to ask for permission – it’s already been granted by the platforms that built the tech industry. We’ll take every word every written, every image every created, and every last byte of data spun in real time from the minds and actions of billions. And if things go wrong later – not that they ever will! – we’ll just ask for forgiveness, and Heaven awaits no matter what. It’ll all work out! We’ve got money to spend, data to exploit, and worlds to conquer! Let’s gooooooooooo!!!!!!!
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