The Most Terrifying Graph I Have Ever Seen
[ Excerpts ]
The AI boom is idiotic, needlessly complex, and wrapped up in a huge amount of convoluted propaganda that makes it nearly impossible to unpick it all and figure out what the hell is actually going on. What we need is a helicopter view. Something that helps us cut through the crap and get a lay of the land. Only then can we chart a way forward that doesn’t end in disaster. There is one simple graph that does this better than anything I have ever seen. However, it is truly terrifying, and not for reasons you might think, because AI has very little to do with AI.
The logic surrounding the AI boom is utterly moronic. The idea is to gamble the entire Western economy by heavily investing in technology that will wipe out almost all jobs. It is a lose-lose scenario. If the bet fails, the economy crashes. If the bet succeeds, the economy crashes.
Actually, AI is not replacing jobs at all.
I know I keep referring to these studies, but they are so damn important. A recent MIT report found that 95% of AI pilots didn’t increase a company’s profit or productivity. A recent METR report also found that AI coding tools actually slow developers down. Why?
Well, generative AI models, even the very latest ones, often get things wrong and “hallucinate”, which requires considerable human oversight to correct.
- IT consultants Gartner attempted to quantify this and found that AI agents fail to complete office tasks around 70% of the time.
- A recent Harvard Business Review survey has found that 40% of workers have had to deal with “workslop” in the past month, which they define as “AI-generated work content that masquerades as good work but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task.”
- Each workslop incident wastes nearly two hours on average, meaning that for every 10,000 workers, workslop costs $9 million per year in wasted time, easily wiping out any productivity gains from deploying AI and reducing overall productivity.
AI is lightyears away from profitability (read more here) and can’t be used to effectively improve productivity (read more here), and we have known it has been butting up against a serious diminishing returns issue, meaning it physically can’t get much better than it is today, for years now (read more here). As a business, as an investment, AI makes no sense at all. It should not be valued remotely highly.
[ Big tech's growth at all costs ] has pushed the US into a functional recession, even if the S&P 500 didn’t reflect it. Deutsche Bank found that if you exclude AI expenditure from the US’s GDP, its growth has actually dropped off rapidly to near zero, which is a key warning sign of a recession. The cost of living is soaring, real-term wages have fallen, and unemployment has risen. This threatened to crush the actual economy, so the Federal Reserve began cutting interest rates in late 2024 to boost investment and create jobs and has continued to cut them since.
So, why haven’t we seen job openings grow since then?
Suddenly, investment banks, venture capitalists and large corporations can borrow huge amounts of money for far less. They should invest in corporate expansion and create new jobs, right? But they had just experienced multiple years of the only significant growth coming from this separate economy of intra-industry speculative AI investing. So, Big Tech, their investors, and their investment-banking backers used this new, cheaper debt to pour more money into this false self-valuing money machine, because that was where they saw the most significant return.
If you have ever wondered why CEOs, analysts, hedge fund managers and the corporate elite have such a twisted and ignorant view about AI, this is why. To them, it is a miracle. When the economy should be going down, and their assets falling in value, they can stave it all off by dumping money into this false money machine. They don’t care if it hurts the actual business or if the entire premise of AI is utterly false. It makes them filthy rich when they should be losing money, so they are more than happy to queue up for it.
[This graph] shows that AI is just a symptom of Big Tech and the financial elite hijacking the economy for their own gain.
That is why this graph is terrifying. It shows that the authoritarian oligarchy has not just taken control of the politics in the US. but also its very economic foundations. It is an unseen authoritarian corporate coup in the world’s most powerful country. That is literally deathly terrifying for every living person on the planet.