History repeating?
This week I stumbled across a news item: Nvidia booked $26 billion in revenue in one quarter for chips delivered against the promise of future computing capacity. The payment wasn't made with money but with cloud credits for future resources.
It's not so much the number that caught my attention but the pattern behind it. Historians like to speak of the "long 19th century" when they want to describe the epoch from 1789 to 1914 with a zeitgeist characterized by an unwavering belief in unlimited progress and its infinite possibilities.
The news of Nvidia reminded me, that the railroad was financed back then with the same promise of future profits. And although the miracle of overcoming time and space at unprecedented speed has brought no lasting material gains to this day, the railroad nevertheless transformed Western societies.
A dream that doesn't die
Also in the 19th century, Parisian doctors began to view aging as a disease, with the desire to transcend the earthly limitations of humans through medical progress, not in the afterlife but already on earth. The natural course of our lives thus became something that must be fought against. How far this notion gripped society at the time is shown among other things by Maxim Gorky with his God-Builders movement, which wanted to abolish death.
The dream of eternal youth is still living, though. I do notice whenever I see in the mirror how time has carved itself into my skin, no matter if I like it or not. Even when I try to see every wrinkle as an expression of a well-lived past, I think, it would be nice, if time could pass me by without a trace.
This ambivalence probably clings to every advancement when it's measured against material reality. Sam Altman, Jeff Bezos, Larry Page invest billions in life extension. Ray Kurzweil takes over 80 pills daily and believes that scientific progress will soon be faster than aging. And with AI, work is now being done on gene sequences so that we humans finally live beyond 100 years, without growing old.
The justification is often that it solves the problems of our aging society. Perhaps that's true; I still think, as with the railroad, it remains an expression of humanity's striving to be elevated above time and space and in this way to transcend itself and its earthly limitations.
Since the AI boom shows 17 times more investment than the New Economy before the dot-com crash, but nearly 80% of companies deploying AI currently see no significant impact on their profits and 95% of generative AI initiatives so far create no measurable added value, there is an inconvenient reality behind those numbers. It's not clear what exactly would need to be measured to assess AI's value for a company. And yet money flows as if there were no tomorrow, even from our chronically underfunded healthcare systems.
Is our future the price for our present?
What's important is the differentiation that the entire development of AI at the moment is currently not about value creation but about growth. What's being traded is the promise of value. Nvidia buys with chips the promise of future provision of resources in the face of shortages already expected today. This shows the radicalization of a pattern we've been repeating now for 200 years: We sell the future to finance our present.
But what underpins this future? Not algorithms or code, it‘s infrastructure: Energy, semiconductors, cooling systems, rare earth minerals. While we debate AI capabilities, the power over the physical foundations that make any of it possible remains highly concentrated. If you follow the infrastructure, blockchain mining farms cluster where electricity is cheap. Datacenters rise near hydroelectric plants. AI training happens where power is abundant and affordable. This isn‘t accidental, it‘s structural.
We fixate on software while ignoring the material constraint. Energy isn‘t the only critical resource, data, talent, and chip manufacturing matter too. But it‘s the one we discuss least while it constrains most. And that might be the actual news.
I'm neither a tech billionaire nor have I founded a company. I have great respect for people who accomplish such things and thereby revolutionize the world. I work for a software company and in my spare time I write down my thoughts from a position of relative safety. I‘m not outside the system, but I‘m dealing with the contradictions from within it. And these contradictions raise uncomfortable questions, such as: What does technological progress mean for a life like mine? Is what I achieved myself worth less in view of what remains of it in the future? Am I worth less?
Honestly, I don‘t think so. I understand the development of artificial intelligence as another break in the narrative of progress. Not because it supposedly changes everything in unprecedented ways, but because it reveals who this development benefits: A handful of individuals whose influence on our lives grows daily. They suggest that what constitutes millions of people should be replaceable by a single technology.
Maybe that‘s why digital oligarchs declare our society at large inefficient and outdated. What they don't say is that they envision a world in which we all become the disposable mass of a few, which needs to play by their arbitrary rules. But, in doing so, they systematically overestimate the performance capacity of societies that operate by ordre du mufti. Such societies quickly lose their creative capacity because productive dissent is no longer provided for.
Without doubt, tech billionaires have the means to influence nearly all social processes, also because the promise of growth seems to carry more weight in politics than value creation. However, if our current social and economic system is run into the ground by the arbitrariness and empty promises of a few, we all pay the price for it. History provides plenty of examples that self-elevation is one of the most successful formulas for cultural decline.
The question of value
That’s the reason why value creation is not a technical question, it's an existential question. Because what's at stake is not just the money and self-image of human beings. What's at stake is the possibility that as many people as possible can lead a self-determined life, with or without technology, with or without AI, with or without progress.
People need time to derive meaning from developments and technological leaps. Retrospection is also important for this. We don't learn exponentially, we can't become arbitrarily faster. We age, no matter how many pills we swallow. We die, no matter how many gene sequences are manipulated. Those who never pause and reflect on their certainties don't notice when the ice is too thin to walk on.
Follow the money - even if it’s cloud credits - and you‘ll realize, that AI itself isn’t the real issue. The question is who owns the infrastructure it runs on. Our existence is not devalued if it doesn't meet the standards of those who believe they've found the new world formula. Learn faster, live longer, grow beyond yourself: What if the real challenge is to grasp the meaning behind it all? Sure, we can colonize the moon, Mars too - at least in our imagination. We can build cities there and a new world. But why should we do that? Because we have rockets that can take us to other planets and moons?
The quality of time
Perhaps the most important competence of our time is simply not to take ourselves too seriously and yet seriously enough to truly honor the uniqueness of our lives. Perhaps it's enough to recognize when a promise is a promise that will very likely never be kept. We are mortal. We are slow. We are limited. Isn't that what makes our existence so precious, our lives so valuable and the pain so strong when we think about the loss of our lifetime?
Seen from this perspective, I understand the triumph of artificial intelligence better as quite logical: It promises time savings, just as the railroad did back then. And perhaps - precisely because of this - an important question arises: What value and quality does the time have we gain due to AI? How do we spend it and what exactly do we do with it?
Even though the answer to this question is very individual, it doesn't cost $26 billion. I write this from a position where I can choose how to spend my energy. Not everybody can, though. But perhaps that‘s exactly the point: What matters most isn‘t finding universal answers, but resisting the monopoly on truth that tech narratives claim. My perspective is partial, and so is yours. That‘s not a weakness, it‘s reality. And acknowledging it is how we avoid replacing one dogma with another.
In this spirit, I wish you a warm and happy Xmas season!