Thank You Jensen Huang

Now that it has become clear that the artificial intelligence "boom" is going boom in a different way, a broader context suggests an even louder boom is on the way. 

We live in an infinite growth economic system, largely due to the survival needs of our mass capitalist system. This includes the rest of the industrialized world - Europe, Canada, Latin America, the Mideast, Russia and China. Industrial economies need to keep growing in order to generate increasing profits. As long as profits keep increasing, corporations stay in business. When profits stagnate or decline, stock market prices of shares of corporate stock decline, and they get sold in a downward spiral. 

As this happens across the economy, capital formation - the process by which investment is carried on to expand a corporation's profit-seeking - becomes prohibitive. Businesses go into decline, and eventually collapse. If this continues far enough, entire economies can go into collapse, spreading to other countries, and even to the entire planet.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been the only motor to growth in recent years, and it has largely been speculative growth, resting on the promise of great things to come. The great things to come are illusory, with the speculative rewards going to the very few, estimated by some as between three and seven percent of the population. The building of data centers is presented as a great benefit, providing the ever carrot on the stick of jobs. They don't mention that the jobs will be gone once the data centers are built, but the hoax keeps going. 

Thanks to Jensen Huang, the fragility of the AI bubble is now plain for all to see. The most powerful person in the industry has been found to have human frailties, engaging in several extramarital affairs, most notably with a suspected spy for the government of China. If the industry can be brought down by such a simple vulnerability, its promise to keep infinite growth going indefinitely is now obviously a false promise.

This will be the end of capitalism. We need to replace it with something else. The alternative of socialism is bandied about a lot these days. Rarely is it explained what socialism actually is. In economics it is described as investment of the means of production by the people as a whole. In other words, public ownership of industry. No private corporate ownership. Small businesses would continue to be privately owned, with some publicly owned.

Socialism may be appealing, but I believe the place to start is to put an end to the ideology of infinite growth.  For the interested, economist Herman Daly wrote the bible of zero growth in his 1977 book Steady State Economics. 

Another pioneering work of economics on a human scale is Small is Beautiful by E.F. Schumacher, particularly his chapter on Buddhist Economics. 

We are facing a fundamental challenge to our way of being on this planet. Climate change should be enough of a warning that we have squandered the great bounty that the natural world has given us for free. That squandering is about to abruptly end.

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Here's a song. Here's another. Neil Young. A song for capitalism. Alternate version. Money talks, but with a forked tongue. For the greedocrats, this.