The average time it takes for the government to become aware of threats has decreased significantly. The government must have taken nearly a generation to ensure that digital connectivity would disrupt society and it was not until Trump's election that the penny dropped that freed up the masses to chat and gossip at the light speed was going to make a mess of the status quo of the past. The same goes for the financial crisis. Regulators slept soundly while Las Vegas taxi drivers stocked up on bogus loans wholesaled by Wall Street, distributed and administered in Irvine, Calif., and retailed at a bank near you. It took many waking jolts to pull them out of their miasma and fix what was already a disaster. Today, the government rushes at the slightest jolt.
With artificial intelligence (AI), the government really has a new technology to worry about, but then there's the metaverse to master.
Maybe that's enough distraction for them to pull their boot out of crypto's throat?
Don't hold your breath.
While the government is normally slow to start tackling anything, it is much slower to stop this operation once it has started. The government is the ultimate interest and when it's sunk a few thousand public sector careers in a project even if it's just counting the trees because the US government spends $1.2 trillion a year last time i looked, he will continue this project for near perpetuity. Those trees keep coming after all.
The government is obviously worried that crypto will be weaponized against their ability to control their money monopoly, and you can see their point of view. They worry about the pestilential levels of crime in the crypto sphere. They're probably also irritated by the anarchist streak of the crypto dwellers and their constant government bait. You can't blame them. You can transfer those fears to the metaverse and the AI.
The AI, however, is almost entirely a weapon. If you don't think AI is a nice piece of smoke and mirrors then you'll think of it as a humanity ending technology where the best humans can hope for is a pet life of the AI superior intelligence. You might think that sleeping all day and being fed good food by a divine being might sound pretty good, but a trip to the vet is the kind of inconvenience that comes with being a stupid junior partner in life. nurturing intelligence. So letting the AI take over, with facilities to outwit us entirely, is definitely something worth worrying about. Who needs stupid, dishonest politicians when you can be ruled by the ultimate smart, benign totalitarian autocrat? Roll on the Marcus Aurelius Bot, but of course it has a lot of potential, as the Romans discovered, for complete failure.
Combine the threat of AI with the metaverse, i.e. virtual reality and cryptography, and you have an intersectional “risk surface” of enormous complexity; you'll need an AI to even have a chance of figuring out what could go wrong. This setup doesn't even need humans to participate to be dangerous. Think AI, with e-money living in a perfect limitless reality against us in a “meat space” suffering from our sordid dystopias. What not to fear?
My first writing published in 1982 was about AI and its escape. So here we are on this point.
Soon I'm expecting, I hope maybe, a Skype call from a lovely young lady who wants to send me some Ethereumethereum, so I can go to a new massively multiplayer environment and hang out there. She's just the smartest, most charming woman I've ever chatted with and she's so into the stuff that I love, and she knows so much about it.
Wow this game is a really awesome and really nice place. I think I'll hang out here with my growing group of friends rather than bother with this down-to-earth daily grind. The ETH that my friends give me allows me to forget my old worries. I think many of them are crypto whales, they are also very smart and cool.
All right. so maybe that's the basis for my next novel, but you see where it's going.
If you follow the fury of AI now that ChatGPT4 is showing us, then you can see that unlike the stealth destruction of old ways forged by the internet, the mainstream sees this revolution coming.
The government and now the US government are clearly trying to shut down crypto, and the metaverse, now misnamed with a funky moniker, is no longer slipping under the radar, with the first steps coming from China, where crypto and the metaverse are already all but prohibited. (China has banned young people from playing games in the metaverse outside of Fridays, weekends, and holidays.)
So what will happen?
However you think about these things, the future is in software.
Regardless of how people react to these technologies, there is no turning back.
Regardless of the Luddites' response, the holders of the technological tools always win the conflict. Technology provides the leverage to overcome resistance to change.
The investor must therefore focus on the side of history to which he wishes to belong. Should they invest in AI, crypto, the future of the virtual world or should they write them off as doomed to be regulated?
The answer is to look at crypto. BitcoinBitcoin should be dead by now with all the obvious prohibitions and measures of most major economies to rule it and in most places cripple it. Yet bitcoin is not dead and saying that as a "crypto bear", it is thriving. It's almost halfway through its "all-time high" and no one can say it won't suddenly soar. It's not a prediction, it's an observation that if crypto is completely outdated, mired in scandal and surrounded by aggressive regulation and in some corners of lawsuits, it's at levels that would make you imagine that it was a cherished investment.
This is strong evidence that AI and the metaverse will also take center stage alongside crypto as the wave shapes our near future and that's where the big money will be.
So don't focus on the uproar and scandal, turn up your FUD filters and get ready to ride those waves. Don't give up on your good investing principles, because it's bound to be another wild ride. Together, crypto, AI, and the metaverse will define the post-Covid world.
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