By Violet Wisdom
Just ask your 401k. It's interesting that AI didn’t predict this. As it turns out, AI isn’t nearly the be-all, end-all everyone expected it to be. Or at least, what investors thought it would be. In fact, the internet itself seems to be collapsing in on itself. Search engines simply don’t work well. The internet is saturated and your search results are a bad combination of paid exposure and a failing AI attempt to provide what you’re looking for based on your browsing history (because obviously, we aren’t capable of knowing what we really want to see).
Yesterday, August 5, 2024 the stock market saw a drop of over 1,000 points. Everyone got a little overly excited about what AI would be able to do and freaked out when it turned out it wasn’t quite meeting expectations. Japan experienced its largest stock market drop since 1987. Japan manufactures AI chips, the entire industry collectively suffered all at once. Even the Oracle from Omaha, Warren Buffett has sold over half his Apple stock this year, that’s saying something.
To top it all off, these dismal earnings reports happened to come in on the heels of some not so great unemployment numbers, different subject, but keeping things in perspective.
I got two letters in the mail last week notifying me that some of my data was stolen at some point in the last five years. I got an email from a third. They all read the same, your information was stolen from our system… sorry about that. These letters go in the same place as solicitations and credit card offers, the “worthless bucket” that is destined for my next bonfire.
After the recent news that Google’s Incognito wasn’t incognito at all, the tech giant also made news yesterday after a Federal Judge ruled the company a monopoly (which by the way isn’t allowed per the law here in the United States.)
We have become dependent on a technology-based system that doesn’t function very well. It isn’t capable of protecting our data, our bank cards, or our information. By the time us humans figure out how to protect a system from the most recent hack, a new one is underway. Even upgrades to keep systems safe can apparently cause worldwide blackouts with one tiny glitch. It took only one bug in one file of many in an IT update a few weeks ago to shut down 8 million computers around the world. This left airplanes unable to fly, banks to close and news stations to go off the air.
I’m not a stockbroker, but I’m not feeling very warm and fuzzy about investing any money or our future in something that seems to be going the wrong direction.
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