Fake Blame.

Last week a fake video made the rounds of musk, altman and bezos (I refuse to capitalize proper nouns when the people, places or things they're noun-ing are by no means proper) about AI being powered by newly unemployed people riding exercise bikes to power data centers. 

Yes, according to these people, we were put here on earth to be draft animals and/or cannon fodder for the plutocrat class. Before long we’ll bring back Hobbes’ nasty brutish and short lifestyle, if we haven't already. Those are the terms and conditions we’re forced to accept.

Meanwhile, back in reality-ville (a shrinking community of pariahs) headlines like these are all-too-frequent.

In what's left of the decimated ad industry (editor's note: decimatio was a Roman military concept--over 2,000 years old. It was a form of military retribution that called for the execution of one out of ten of a particular group. In modern usage, we bastardize the word to mean complete annihilation. We don't really decimate our enemies anymore we more eighty-percent-imate them) A.I. is increasingly being blamed decimation. It is blamed for the destruction of thousands of jobs, dozens of agencies and trillions of dollars of brand-equity accumulated through the decades.

WPP blames AI. It never blames its abject "out-of-touch-with-reality-ness." What do I mean by that? They've shed 80% of their revenue and their clients and their viability. They're shrinking as fast as a libido in an old-age home. Yet they are trying (vainly) to position themselves as something they call a "growth partner." HINT: Before you call yourself a growth partner, make sure you're growing. 

AI, to my non-cataracted eyes, has become a convenient scape-goat for the destruction of entire industries and countless lives. Just as when two-feet of snow are dumped across half the country or 500-year-storms occur roughly every other years, we don't blame exxon and their fellow petrodestructors, we blame something vague and un-arrestable. We castigate climate change not big oil's role in it. 

This is a semantic shifting of the blame that 98.98% of all people are too busy bemoaning to actually realize what's happening.

Here's a more concrete example.

We blame job loses in an amorphous way on AI. (AI is un-prosecutable. We can't lynch it, despite the mention of pitchforks above. We don't even tax the billionaires behind it.)

We blame job loses on AI.

We never say, who's behind AI.

We never say
if elon musk pays himself one-trillion dollars,
that's $1,000,000,000,000,
that's the cause of disruption.

No one ever does the math and says
$1,000,000,000,000
is ten million (10,000,000)
$100,000 salaries.

The disruption is not caused by AI,
it's caused by one person deciding he is worth more to the world
than ten-million people earning $100,000/year.

musk pays himself enough to give everyone in all these states $100,000/year.

Or, the same to every resident of the 2, 3, 4, 5, and 1/2 of the 6th largest cities in the US. 

Back in 2016, WPP had an annual revenue of about $14,000,000,000, just slightly more than their annual revenue today, a decade later. (Profit has decreased in that time by more than 75%.) 

Martin Sorrell took $100,000,000 of that money as his own compensation. The compensation committee agreed to policies like these.(The compensation committee decides its own compensation):

I refuse to blame "exogenous" technologies for the destruction of giant swaths of our industry and the world economy. 

I blame those who treat everything like it is an extractive industry. They remove all value and leave nothing but slag and mercury-poisoned water behind.

An example of destruction from "The Radical Potter,"
by Tristram Hunt.

I blame greed. That most biblical and second-most damning of all sins. (Hubris is first.)

And the world’s most-effective and least-prosecuted killer.

Shakespeare, as usual, could have written this post in a dozen words. As in Cassius' to Brutus in "Julius Caesar." (Not about salad.)

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,

But in ourselves,