What If AI Makes All of Us Dumb?

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Today’s Agenda

• AI is playing tricks on your eyes
• Air conditioners are a catch-22.
• luxury biz is losing its luster.
• Johor is not the new Singapore … yet.

The AI Era

Yesterday a friend sent me this TikTok with over 700,000 views, where someone snagged last-minute tickets to Taylor Swift’s MetLife show this weekend on Ticketmaster for only $17 each. “TAYLOR HERE WE COME,” the caption reads:

If you go on StubHub, resale tickets for the same show are going for as much as 800 times that — $13,691, or the price of a 2017 used Toyota Camry. So how can it be that someone could find one for $17? If you pause the video on the ticket purchase page, you’ll see options for Sections 506 and 508. That sounds benign, until you realize that MetLife Stadium doesn't have a Section 506 or 508. 

Although it seems the video wasn’t made with AI or anything fancy like that, it exposes the types of hyper-personalized, predatory scams that could proliferate online in our new era of artificial intelligence. It's no wonder why Texas lawmakers want to ban bots from buying concert tickets. AI-generated videos are still in their infantile stages, but in a few years you could easily envision bots exploiting demand for human entertainment. “A lie can travel around the world and back again while the truth is still lacing up its boots. In a world where more content than ever is being generated artificially, we’ll all need to become more skeptical about what we see onlineParmy Olson writes. AI-generated images can range from the harmless — see: woman laughing alone with a salad — to the sinister: Yesterday, a fabricated photo of the Pentagon exploding in a cloud of smoke went viral on Facebook and Twitter, propelled by accounts that were verified under Elon Musk’s system for blue checkmarks.

Despite the dangers, Adrian Wooldridgeremains hopeful. He argues that AI — contrary to what the authors of this new book believe — is “empowering regular workers by making it easier to find and present information” (even if some of that information is Total Crap). Regardless of where you stand on the whole “is AI going to ruin society” debate, there’s no denying that it’s here to stay. ChatGPT, as a product, has blown every single marketing campaign in existence out of the water. Less than a year after its public introduction, everyone knows what that “Chat-G... whatever” thing is — your mother, her best friend Shelly, Shelly’s six-year-old grandson … the list goes on. Tyler Cowen points out that the release of OpenAI’s chatbot was “more as an experiment than as part of a well-thought-out campaign.” And it’s evident in the name itself: “Many successful tech products have happy, shiny, memorable names: Instagram, Roblox, TikTok,” Tyler writes, and ChatGPT — which stands for Generative Pre-Trained Transformer — is none of those things. It’s technical and clunky, even. But still, it’s better than . Despite all the iterations — GPT-2, GPT-3, GPT-3.5, GPT-4 — ChatGPT is intensely sticky, forever imprinted in our brains as a game-changer that gave way to a whole new era of machine-generated intelligent content.

Of course, there’s a risk that all these bots and their falsehoods will make intelligent beings — humans (a generous assumption, I know) — do dumb stuff themselves. That’s Aaron Brown’s worry, at least. He looked at the dawn of AI through the lens of hedge funds, and reminds us that “replacing smart humans with dumb computers clearly has more downside than upside for markets

Lionel Laurent, too, sees the AI gold rush taking humanity to some dark places. And by dark places, I mean a world in which our eyeball blueprints get encoded on the blockchain and sold on the dark web for money, which kinda sounds like the plot of that really old Shia LaBeouf movie, Eagle Eye. Lionel says a company called Worldcoin wants to use its rather freaky network of iris scans to make a “World ID.” If more “crypto bros get seduced by the wave of enthusiasm for all things AI-related,” he predicts that the technological use cases could get even more reckless. At that point, fake Taylor Swift tickets will be the least of our worries.

Hot In Here

We’re quickly approaching the time of year when everything smells and is sticky. You know what I’m talking about: The humid season when you have to make a pit-stop in the bathroom whenever you enter a building because your clothes are sticking to you like cling wrap. You have emergency paper towels in your purse, you strategically crossed the street to stay in the shade, and yet you still have an ungodly amount of sweat on your upper lip — a hereditary trait, according your mom — but all of this is fair game on a soggy New York City summer day.

But it doesn’t matter if you’re in the Big Apple or Belize. Nobody enjoys extreme heat, which is probably why an additional 1 billion air conditioning units are going to be installed by the end of the decade. “For many, owning an air conditioner has already become a matter of survival rather than comfort,” Lara Williams writes. But that creates a cycle that’s more satanic than Satan himself: “Air conditioners are a disaster for the planet, containing toxic coolants with greater warming potential than CO2 and drawing on precious energy resources. So more air conditioners means more potential warming, which means more air conditioners,” she explains. The only way to save the planet is to break the cycle — before we all drown in a pool of our own sweat, or worse.

Telltale Charts

Well, that was fast. Luxury stocks went from being hot to not in a matter of months, thanks to wavering US consumers who may have reached the end of their spending binge. For the past three years, “Chinese regions yo-yoed between lockdowns and reopening,” Andrea Felsted writes, but “Americans, particularly young consumers who had discovered European luxury, kept spending.” Now that their credit cards are maxed out, there’s no longer an appetite for nylon Prada bags or Gucci slides.

For many people, Singapore’s absurd housing prices have become untenable, so they have no other choice but to commute into the city from Southern Malaysia. Johor is “often depicted as an arm of the island’s economy,” Dan Moss says, but it needs a lot of work before it comes anywhere close to taking Singapore’s crown as a global money center.

Further Listening

Tim O’Brien spoke with Josh Koskoff, the attorney who represented the Sandy Hook families in the Remington case, for the latest episode of Crash Course.

Further Reading

Asylum seekers are being blocked from doing what the American economy needs them to do: work. — Bloomberg’s editorial board

Nearly every teenager in the US is on social media. Regulating it is easier said than done. — Lisa Jarvis

It took 200 days and countless lives for Bakhmut to fall. Does Russia really call that a victory? — Leonid Bershidsky

AMLO is sending a message to Mexico’s second-richest man. — Juan Pablo Spinetto

We have too many banks because the people in charge don’t want to give up control. — Ed Hammond

The UK has a speeding scandal on its hands, and Rishi Sunak may take the hit. — Therese Raphael

China has a new Covid wave

Ron DeSantis will launch his 2024 bid on Twitter.

The Catholic clergy’s sex abuse scandal gets worse.

The White House barrier crasher was arrested.

are getting even more expensive.

Kickers

Country radio has a lady problem

The culprit behind New York’s dinosaur destruction. (h/t Ellen Kominers

Chinchillas are blowing human minds.

Pop culture baby names are iconic. (h/t Jhodie Williams

Florence Pugh, Hollywood savior.

Notes: Please send iris scans and feedback to Jessica Karl at [email protected].

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To contact the author of this story:

Jessica Karl[email protected]

To contact the editor responsible for this story:

Tobin Harshaw[email protected]