Why America's Obsessed With AI

We’ve been talking about what I call “somethings” and “nothings.” The idea that, for example, America’s based on the notion that people should have nothing, be nothing, deserve nothing, that there’s nothing inherent, from healthcare to dignity and so on.

Now we’re going to use this little framework. To discuss a little bit why America’s so obsessed with AI—and in particular, what it means for the economy and the future. I even drew you a little chart (go ahead and chuckle at me messily breaking in the pastels) that we’re going to discuss.

(Of course, you might not be so obsessed, but as a society, it’s hard to go a second these days without hearing about AI, overhearing people talking about it, being bombarded with it, etcetera.)

The world isn’t like this.

Outside America, almost…nobody…is obsessed with AI. Nobody much cares. Of course, societies have their tech dorks, and their computer guys, and so forth, and they care. But as a…relentless point of social focus? As a kind of mania? As a breathless awe-inspiring utopia that’s all consuming?

The world rolls its eyes and yawns, mostly. If you went to Paris, Barcelona, Hong Kong, doesn’t matter, and you gushed over AI the way that America does, people would wonder if you were mentally ill (I’m not being snide, I mean actually, they’d be concerned.)

So what’s the deal here? What gives? A lot is going on, and it speaks volumes about what America is, where it’s going, and how the world is changing. AI is really just a reflection of all those things, as a social phenomenon, not just a technology.

Probably the first reason that America’s obsessed with AI is that America loves capitalism. Americans are made to be subservient to capitalism—nowhere else in the world do you get bombarded with everything from stock market updates to remonstrations to check your credit score—and so of course, they’re in a mania over it’s Next Big Thing. Because this one makes all kinds of fantastical promises, from social utopias to deity-like powers. And in all this, of course, many Americans see money.

Anyone vaguely intelligent should know it’s a bubble, but bubbles are made of manias like this. America’s prone to bubbles much more so than other economies precisely because capitalism needs manias and hypes to whip people into frenzies. So Americans get excited about capitalism the way the French get excited about art or the Italians get passionate about food. It’s a little wierd, if we’re honest, because art and food are the stuff life’s made of, and capitalism’s just…come one, do I have to say it? Soulless. We’re going to talk about that more in a second.

That’s the next point to grasp. America’s economy has no future. Apart from AI, there is nothing to…get excited about…even if you’re just into capitalism, versus anything interesting or cool or civilized. This isn’t remotely true in other countries. Europe’s biggest industries are centered around its cultural interests of art and food, for example. The next ones, around climate change. And all those have a future. But America’s economy has nothing next apart from AI.

That should worry you profoundly, by the way, if you’re American. It shows up, for example, in stock markets, which are flat or down, apart from tech companies. An economy should always have a future. That future should be made of a vision. America stopped doing that long ago, because—remember “nothings”? If a society’s based on the idea that people should have nothing, then why bother envisioning a future for an economy?

The American economy turned predatory, and the flipside is that there are no constructive or positive visions or ideas for its future. There’s only AI, and hence, this massive bubble’s forming. Because America’s a hyper capitalist society, in which nothing but money matters, AI is all there is next, period, for society, for the economy, for people, for human existence, or maybe the lack thereof. 

That’s depressing. Really depressing, if you ask me. Because envisioning tomorrow should be about life. Not just whatever gimmick capitalism’s cooked up to try and grease its rusting wheels next.

This isn’t a criticism of capitalism, by the way. I’m teaching you that it’s obsolete. I know, I know Americans will howl and froth and crawl along the floor like they’re possessed when I say that. Let’s get real. America’s collapsing, and capitalism imploding into fascism is why. This system, this paradigm, is obsolete now, and you have to protect yourself from it, at least if you’re smart, and that includes your wealth.

So interestingly, one of the things AI mania reveals is just how obsolete capitalism really is. Or are you going to eat and drink ChatGPT on a burning planet?

That brings me to the next reason, and the real reason, that America’s so obsessed with AI, and the world isn’t.

Because the world doesn’t need it.

When I go the cafe in Paris or Barcelona or where have you, do you know what’s different about it from America? In America, cafes are…dead zones of the human spirit. People are just glued to their phones, computers, screens. They don’t even look at each other. But everywhere else? You’d be caught dead staring at your phone like a zombie idiot in Paris. Literally, people would probably shame you into leaving.

Other countries are alive.

They are rich in ways that America isn’t, and these are the ways of real wealth. They’re rich in social bonds, rich in social ties, relationships, networks, knowledge, truth. They’re curious. They buzz and hum. I often remark on how Europeans hug each other in the streets, laugh, smile, embrace. It’s true, and while Americans dismiss it as a cliche, this is warmth. This is life.

In America, though, life is diametrically the opposite. I just read that half of middle aged Americans are technically lonely. That’s…terrible. But it’s America. It’s a lonely, isolated, alienated society. People don’t even look at each other, like I said above. And talk to each other? 

So making friends in America is incredibly hard. Virtually impossible now. And it shows in all the statistics, too, about how few friends people have now. But making friends elsewhere? It’s not just easy, it’s natural. Go to the same cafe, bar, restaurant, for a week, less, and I guarantee you, you will…make friends. Without “trying.” Natural, as in, this is life.

Now think about relationships. In America, relationships between men and women are breaking down catastrophically. To the point that it’s become a topic of cultural currency to speak about how useless men are, and again, that shows in the statistics, too, from marriage to relationships right down to sex itself.

So: America really is the alienated place that capitalism makes of societies. Back when this concept was theorized, it used to be just theoretical. But America has shown us that it’s really true: too much capitalism really does blow apart social bonds, to the point of rupturing democracy, and leaves people alienated, and that word means something like: aliens in their own lives. 

Estranged from existence itself.

Somethings and nothings, remember?

So. There’s the American. Isolated, lonely, alienated. An atom in a merciless machine. Trapped in an inhuman place where relationships and friendships themselves are becoming luxuries. Where even just someone to listen to your problems and concerns on is something to be charged money for. Where nobody is to have dignity, respect, be treated as a human being.

There’s the American, alone. Estranged from existence. Facing the brutality and horror and meaninglessness of predatory capitalism, day after day, being humiliated, demeaned, dehumanized, made to feel like nothing, and being told to pretend that everything’s fine. 

Of course they’re going to turn to AI.

In many ways. As substitutes for the many forms of professional advice they can no longer afford, from therapeutic to medical to financial and more. As substitutes for friends, which are all but impossible to make. As substitutes for relationships, which become more costly and difficult to obtain. 

As substitutes. That’s a formal economic term, by the way, and I’ll discuss more why in just a moment. 

For what? For life. 

It’s sad to think of a society in which people are forced to turn to AI for basic forms of human contact, support, guidance, and even friendship. But America is that society, because of course, capitalism doesn’t want you to have any of that—the more lonely, demoralized, and empty you are, so much the easier it is to exploit you even more ruthlessly. 

AI is capitalism’s latest answer to capitalism’s problems, its malaises, its absences and emptinesses, its despair and bleakness, its nothings.

But AI is also a nothing. Because of course every moment that we accept this substitute for friends, lovers, relationships, guidance, learning, knowledge, we are not really living. We aren’t forming human ties. We aren’t having experiences. We aren’t existing as primaries, which is to say, being existential agents, moving through the world in an authentic, lived way. We’re giving up all that, sitting there, glued to a screen, in a substitute of a life. 

Believe me, a real friend or lover loves you. A real professional guides you. A real teacher cares for you. In all these things, deeply, seriously, primarily, as a first mover in the world themselves, as a being of their own. 

Now think of people in the rest of the world. There they are, sitting at a cafe or restaurant or just on the street. Already surrounded by friends. It’s midnight. Laughing and talking. It’s 2AM. Thinking and reflecting. Cocooned in care. Linked by human warmth. Embracing each other because all that is genuine. They are linked together in somethings, as someones, and regard each other as everythings.

These ways of life are fundamentally different. One is a life, and the other isn’t, and that’s not a moral judgment, I mean it formally, in the sense that Americans literally even live fewer years.

How much does the world need AI? Not very much at all, if you understand the point I’m making, which is that the world isn’t shattered by capitalism socially, morally, emotionally, psychologically, relationally, like America is. It isn’t existentially devastated in the soul. 

It doesn’t need fake friends and lovers and teachers and assistants. It is too busy living.

The rest of the world may accept AI as a complement, not a substitute. A thing that can help it accomplish a task here or there. But even in that sense, the gains from AI are likely to be limited. Because the world also isn’t nearly as “task-oriented,” which is to say obsessed with work, willing to enslave themselves to it, for the sake of money, as America is.

Now. What is the point I’m trying to make? Just a moral one? Am I just writing “another anti-AI rant”? Not at all. I’m trying to teach you 21st century economics. 

I think that the demand for AI is going to be far, far smaller than it’s expected to be. That’s the point of the little chart I drew for you. It says: in socially alienated societies, the demand for AI will be higher, in a nonlinear way. 

In plain English, the mania about it in America is, well, very American. Americans of a certain kind expect it to make mega-bucks because they’ve never really lived elsewhere, they’re deeply capitalist, and it’s hard to grasp that people don’t need it in other, more functional, societies the way that Americans do, in their decrepit and barren one. 

Right now, the American way of thinking is that “AI will take over the world,” more or less, meaning that the world will just demand endless amounts of it. This is why all the data centers are being built. So that America can provide enough “compute” (this is literally what the industry calls it, LOL, aka, computing power) for the rest of a world that demands more, more, more AI. 

Will it? I doubt it. I seriously doubt it, in fact. I find it very, very hard to foresee a day where people in societies that haven’t been torn apart in the soul, in their relationships, in their minds, in their morals…obsessively demand AI. Why would they need to?

If I’m European, and I have plenty of friends, thank you very much, generous social systems, a functioning social contract, what is AI going to do for me? I don’t need a fake friend, a pretend girlfriend, a wannabe doctor, a faux financial advisor, a cheat-sheet therapist. I already probably have all those things, or can have them easily enough.

Or, for example, if I’m Asian, and I’m born into a dense web of social connections, and I can barely get away from Auntie Number 81739 and have five seconds to myself every day, what is AI going to do for me?

The American vision is that AI is going to help people be better shoppers. That’s what a Wall Street guy’s rejoinder would be. And I’d cheerily remind them that 80% of the world’s consumption comes from…America. So we’re back at square one.

Hence, I think the demand for AI is going to be much smaller than the American mania about it now thinks it’ll be. That mania’s reflective of the fact that AI’s an American thing, not just in supply, but also in demand. .

So this is about economics and finance. Of course AI will make inroads around the world. Yes, it’ll help people answer questions and search for stuff and whatnot. Those are marginal gains, small ones, in efficiency. But the big revolutionary stuff? It’s sort of a joke if you’ve ever lived anywhere outside America, because nowhere else on the planet is as lonely, isolated, alienated, unhappy, and in that way, I’d bet that the biggest consumer of AI ends up being…America.

Which is OK, I guess, in a way. But it’s not OK in the sense above, that no society should be like this, so atomized, so inhuman. AI is an inhuman substitute for a lack of human stuff. Contact, meaning, qualities, truth, people, knowledge, all of it. That’s sad. Remember when capitalism gave us junk food? It was a substitute for real food, and a poor one. That’s what AI is, only for existence.

I don’t think in the end there are going to be many takers for that. I think that sane societies have their futures to tend to. They are interested in existing, not pretending to. That is as it should be. These seductions in the end are only distractions.

Capitalism American style is obsolete because it no longer solves real problems,if it ever did. And here we are, probably seeing the biggest example of all, on a planet facing so many existential challenges. Capitalism’s answer is: you don’t have to exist at all. Have some nothing to solve the problem of having nothing.

Not a very good answer. And so I think a very, very large amount of money will burn. I’d caution against it being yours.

Love,

Umair (and Snowy!)