AI is the new cryptocurrency

Artificial intelligence is the hottest thing to hit the market since the cryptocurrency craze.

It wasn’t long ago that stock values increased just by tacking “blockchain” on to their name: like when Long Island Iced Tea Corp. changed its name to Long Blockchain Corp. and their stocks quadrupled in value.

image created by DALL-E

Or when Eastman Kodak Co., the camera maker, announced that it would go into crypto mining and their stocks tripled in value.

“Then there were the outright scams,” says business reporter Ethan Lou. “The infamous OneCoin raised US$4-billion, but there is no evidence it had even developed a digital currency based on blockchain technology (Globe and Mail, May 6, 2023).”

Now companies are jumping on the latest craze by tacking “ai” on to their names.

A London-based startup company, Engineer.ai, attracted US$30-million after it claimed to use artificial intelligence to build apps. The Wall Street Journal discovered that Engineer.ai’s AI claims were greatly exaggerated – actual humans in India were building the apps.

The value of BigBear.ai Holdings Inc., an information technology services company, is up about 250 per cent this year.

The hype over AI goes beyond the stock market.

If you ask ChatGPT for a definition of something that doesn’t exist, it can, rather convincingly, give you one complete with made-up footnotes. AI developers call these glitches “hallucinations.”

“No one in the field has yet solved the hallucination problems,” Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google and Alphabet, said recently.

Alphabet is into the AI craze with a chatbot called Bard. They didn’t want to be left behind after Microsoft developed an AI-assisted Bing.

Alphabet is moving cautiously after Bing produced hallucinations. When I tried to access Bard, I received a message: ”Bard isn’t currently supported in your country. Stay tuned!”

Naomi Klein finds the hype a bit much. She’s an author, columnist, and Professor of Climate Justice at the University of British Columbia. Klein says:

“Generative AI will end poverty, they tell us. It will cure all disease. It will solve climate change. It will make our jobs more meaningful and exciting. It will unleash lives of leisure and contemplation, helping us reclaim the humanity we have lost to late capitalist mechanization. It will end loneliness. It will make our governments rational and responsive. These, I fear, are the real AI hallucinations and we have all been hearing them on a loop ever since Chat GPT launched at the end of last year (Guardian, May 8, 20223).”

Not only is AI fueling stock market hype and promoting exaggerated claims, it is a ripoff.

Generative AI takes content created by artists and writers, and mashes it together in a novel way to simulate creatively. It could even use images of my house created by Google’s Street View.

“Now the same thing that happened to the exterior of our homes is happening to our words, our images, our songs, our entire digital lives,” says Klein. “All are currently being seized and used to train the machines to simulate thinking and creativity.”

I haven’t given permission to Generative AI to use my photos, my paintings, my writing, for some machine to claim as original.

It’s theft of intellectual property.

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Can blockchain save Robin Hood?

The Robin Hood Co-op was started by a group of artists at the University of Aalto outside Helsinki in Finland. It’s a hedge fund like no other, formed as a piece of “economic performance art.”

image: Information Age

Problems started when the artists began to raise money and invest in the stock market. The university administration took issue with the concept and forced the co-op to shut down.

Instead of shutting down, the artists left the university to venture out on their own.

Since then they focused on building a global network of countercultural investors from Helsinki to California.

The Robin Hood Co-op doesn’t exactly steal from the rich to give to the poor. The goal is to distribute profits to worthwhile causes globally. “Part of the profit generated by the fund is invested into projects building the commons,” according to their website.

They have no regular offices and meet in different places, often abandoned buildings, to hold workshops in conjunction with a local host group.

Reporter Brett Scott went to one of these places in a graffiti-strewn former slaughterhouse in Milan occupied by a radical arts group called Macao. He writes:

“In the hall is a naked woman painted blue, wearing a gas mask, dancing to the sonic violence of industrial deathmetal music. Next door is a punk street-theatre collective manufacturing artificial vomit in buckets to throw at a protest (CCPA Monitor, Nov/Dec, 2018).” Among the assembled were hackers, coders, designers and artists. The meeting had the feeling of the blend of an intellectual salon, a hackathon and a political campaign meeting.

Not your average corporate boardroom.

Portuguese artist Ana Fradique, who co-manages the fund, describes Robin Hood as “artivism”—a mix of arts and activism.

Robin Hood has its critics like Serbian activist Branko Popovic. “I understand you’re trying to be like a vampire on the market,” he says, “but why be a vampire on vampires? They have nothing to give us.”

That’s an ongoing tension amongst activists: do you work within the system to build a more equitable world or tear down the system and rebuild it from scratch?

I many respects, Robin Hood Co-op is conventional. They invest in the Wall Street stock exchange using an algorithm they invented called “The Parasite.” Assets in the co-op are called Robyns. In the first year of investment, they made double-digit returns.

Some of its first distributions went to the autonomous arts space Casa Nuvem in Rio de Janeiro (€5,000) and the activist broadcaster Radio Schizoanalytique in Greece (€6,000).

However, Robin Hood Co-op members are impatient to grow. They plan to expand the model beyond the Parasite algorithm to implementing blockchain. “Robin Hood 2.0.” will be “even more monstrous” than the first incarnation said one of the co-founders.

Rather than being based in Finland, they wants to transform Robin Hood into a decentralized global cryptofund using blockchain -the underlying technology of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum.

While Bitcoins are turning out to be a bit of a dud, the technology of blockchain is promising. It’s an indelible ledger in which anything can be permanently recorded, including shares in an activist hedge fund. The advantage of blockchain is that it’s decentralized and global.

It’s a big leap. Implementation of blockchain will require a change in the culture of the co-op and paid staff.

Time will tell whether this chimera of art and capitalism will prosper.

 

The financialized self

We have become entrepreneurs in the era of globalization.

Each of us is a little business, left to navigate the risky world of investments and the stock market. As a consequence, the role that the state plays in the welfare of citizens has been reduced.

    image: Proxim Group

Now retirement depends on how well we strategize financial speculations. It used to be that pensions were determined by salary and years of service, now it’s risk management.

As financialized subjects, we must consider economic cost–benefit calculations as the natural criteria for evaluating life choices.

The ethos of the financialized self is one of expertise in planning and managing investments. The study of finance has become the key to success. Kyle Liao and Jonah Butovsky explain:

“In viewing their actions through the prism of financial literacy, the individual (entrepreneur) becomes personally and solely responsible for the day-to-day ‘business’ of their lives (CCPA Monitor, Nov/Dec, 2107).”

We are exposed to the machinations of capitalism. If we aren’t skilled in managing our finances, it’s not the fault of capitalism -it’s ours for not being shrewd investors. And when we seek financial advice, it’s from advisors who are also trying to claw their way to the top. We become keys to their success.

TV shows reflect the financialized self. They become grim lessons of what happens when you are not a shrewd manager. Money Moron and Til Debt Do Us Part profile the financial mistakes of ordinary families.

In CBC’s Dragon’s Den, aspiring entrepreneurs pitch business and investment ideas to a panel of venture capitalists (“Dragons”) in the hope of securing business financing and partnerships. U.S., contestants competed for a one-year $250,000 contract to run one of Donald Trump’s companies in The Apprentice. Trump’s pretence as an astute entrepreneur propelled him to the presidency.

The message in both shows is obvious: We, the clever people who have made it to the top, will judge you poor schmucks and your pathetic ideas. The format reminds me of the movie They Shoot Horses Don’t They? in which the lives of a group of contestants intertwine in an inhumanely gruelling dance marathon that is rigged for all to fail.

Of course, the rich are not always that clever. In the Great Recession of 2008, the geniuses who invented dubious investments brought the world to the brink of financial collapse. We, the reluctant citizen entrepreneurs, paid the price. The TSX lost 35 per cent of its value and it took five years just to get back where we started.

With interest rates so low on savings, and with wages that haven’t kept up with inflation, we have little option but to compete in the grim dance of capitalism. The FIRE industries (finance, insurance, and real estate) play the tunes.

Films, biographies, novels, television shows and online content about finance and financiers (lionized or demonized) are more popular than ever.

The inescapable logic of finance shapes public policy and social institutions, from hospitals and schools to scientific research labs, where the prime dictum is ‘risk management,’ ‘return on investment,’ and ‘market efficiency.’ The benefits of pure scientific research are abandoned.

The evolution into financialized citizens has had a profound effect on society. It reduces cooperation and treats everyone as competitors in the marketplace.