A recent study by Goldman Sachs, summarized in Fortune, found no meaningful relationship between AI and productivity at the economy wide level/.

Think carefully about that. 450 Billion, which is more than the GDP of over 100 countries, was sunk (and I mean sunk) into AI last year — for the net result of ZERO economic growth. For 1/6 of that, every college in the US could be free — and you’d have 20 Million smarter adults with no student debt dragging them down, causing them stress, and zapping from their productivity. For 1/12 of that, you could eliminate all the hunger and food insufficiency in the US. For 1/50 of that, you could re-open Alcatraz and provide a King with his own special castle and his own moat.

In other words, there are so many better things that could have been done with that money — including training your people to be more productive, modernizing processes for efficiency, and building deterministic tech that actually works at 1/100 to 1/10000 of the compute power in a data center that’s already powered up.

The only company “winning” is Nvidia, who provides the chips, which means that most of the money is going to its factories in Taiwan and South Korea, and those are the only countries that are actually winning while Americans, who were laid off in droves last year, get poorer, colder and hotter, hungrier and thirstier (as AI sucks up all the energy, which is now not available for heating or air conditioning, and all the water for cooling, which is now not available for drinking or farming).

Think about that the next time you think an overpriced clod or chat, j’ai pété wrapper, even if hyped up as an AI Employee by the A.S.S.H.O.L.E., is going to solve all your problems. Especially since all the Age of AI has done for us is make us dumber, poorer, and less prepared for what is to come next than any age that has come before.