Having too much froth in your economy actually discourages innovation.
David Sacks, Brian Acton, Cal Henderson, Evan Cooke and Steve Kokinos were all smart enough to bring us widespread supersonic commercial flight. But why didn’t they? Because it was much easier for them to all make a billion dollars by iterating on existing enterprise chatroom software. A need that has been served satisfactorily since 1988 by a combination of IRC (with UI skins) and email.
You wouldn’t be able to make a billion dollars coming out with the nteenth enterprise chatroom software without America’s economic froth that enables these tech founders and their confederates in venture capital to become wildly rich by pushing out yet another unremarkable SaaS product.
Apple acquired Siri in 2010. Since then, Siri has only gotten worse. America’s economic froth enables this. If our country’s GDP per were cut in half, Siri might actually work.
America’s tycoons will tell you that economic rabidity, fueled by central bank stimulus, makes your life better. They will tell you that endless money printing increases your standard of living and enables miraculous innovation.
The tycoons are wrong. And they know it.
But they also know that the printing of more central bank funny money inflates the value of their financial assets and allows them to make even more money by piling cash into a company like Calm, which literally produces guided meditation podcasts, but is somehow valued at more than $2B.
Supersonic commercial flight existed 20 years ago. Now we have “put on your mask and enjoy 475 mph!”.
Voice assistants existed 20 years ago, and actually worked, on your Palm Trio. Now we have Siri. Cars today aren’t materially faster than the Porsche 959, which was released in 1986.
Yet we accept the endless yammering and empty promises from our oligarch class about Artificial Intelligence, and how they will cure cancer and type 1 diabetes if we just pony up another $10 Billion.
I will believe that Artificial Intelligence is real when Apple, a company worth $2.65 Trillion, can produce a functional voice assistant.
I played with a Samsung Omnia the other day. The phone was released in 2008 and runs Windows Mobile 6. It’s voice assistant works far better than Siri.
The past decade has been marked by technological regression. You can thank the Federal Reserve.
About The Author: Jacob Wohl is a registered lobbyist who produces Predator DC and hosts Man Up, a weekly show that airs on Censored.TV.
I do wonder: how will this unwind?