Crypto, AI and the Metaverse combine to define the post-Covid world.
The average time for government to wake up to ‘treats has shrunk dramatically. Government must have taken nigh on a generation to ascertain that digital connectivity was going to upend society and it wasn’t till Trump’s election that the penny dropped that unleashing the masses to chat and gossip at the speed of light was going to make a messy of the pasts status quo. The same goes for financial crisis. The regulators were fast asleep while Las Vegas cab drivers were loading up on phony loans wholesaled by Wall Street, distributed and administered in Irvine CA and retailed at a bank near you. It took lots of wakey-wakey jolts to get them out of their miasma and onto fixing what was already a disaster. Today government is swooping at the mildest twitch.
With AI that government really has a new technology to panic about, but then there the Metaverse to get to grips with.
Maybe this is enough distraction for them to take their boot of the throat of Crypto?
Don’t hold your breath.
While Government is normally slow to start address anything it is much slower to stop that operation once its begun. Government is the ultimate vested interest and when it has sunk a few thousand public sector careers into any project, even if it is just counting trees as the US government spends $1200m a year on last time I looked, it will extent that project for near perpetuity. Those trees just keep coming after all.
Government obviously fears Crypto might be weaponised against their ability to control their monopoly of money and you can see their point. They worry about the pestilential levels of criminality in the Crypto sphere. They probably are also irritated by the anarchist tendency of Crypto denizens and their constant governmental baiting. You cant blame them. You can transfer these fears to the Metaverse and AI.
AI however is almost entirely a weapon. If you do not think AI is a nice piece of smoke and mirrors, then you will consider it a humanity ending technology where the best humans can hope for is a life of a pet of the superior AI intelligence. You might think that sleeping all day and being fed nice food by a god-like being may sound pretty good, but a trip to the vet is the sort of downside that comes with being a junior dumb partner of a nurturing intelligence. So letting AI take over, with facilities to outsmart us entirely, really is something worth worrying about. Who needs stupid dishonest politicians when you can ber ruled by the ultimate smart benign totalitarian autocrat. Roll on the Marcus Aurelius Bot, but of course that has lots of potential, as the Romans found out, for utter failure.
Couple the AI threat with the Metaverse, ie Virtual reality and Crypto and that’s an intersectional ‘risk surface’ of massive complexity, you’ll need an AI to even have a chance of understand what could go wrong. That configuration doesn’t even need humans to participate in to be dangerous. Think AI, with E-money living in a perfect boundless reality versus us in ‘meatspace’ suffering our tawdry dystopias. Whats not to fear.
My first published writing back in 1982 was about AI and its escape. So here we are on that cusp.
Pretty soon I’m expecting, perhaps hoping, for a Skype call soon, from a lovely young lady who wants to send me some Ethereum, so I can go onto a new massively multiplayer environment and hang out there. She is just the smartest, most lovely woman I’ve ever chatted with and she is so into the stuff I’m into, and she knows so much about those subjects.
Wow this game is a really great and really kind place… I think I’ll hang out here with my increasingly large group of friends rather than bother with this daily earthbound grind. The ‘eth’ my friends give me makes it possible to forget my old troubles. I think a lot of them are Crypto whales….. they are really smart and cool too….
…OK so maybe that’s the basis of my next novel, but you see where this is going.
If you keep up with the AI furore now ChatGPT4 is showing us up, then you can see that unlike the stealth destruction of old ways wrought by the Internet, the mainstream sees this revolution coming.
Government and now the US government is clearly trying to shut Crypto down and the Metaverse, now miss-named with a funky moniker, is no longer slipping under the Radar, with the first steps coming out of China, where Crypto and metaverse is already all but banned. (China banned playing games in the metaverse for young people apart from Friday, weekends and holidays.)
So what is going to happen.
However you care to think of these things, the future is software.
Whichever way people react to these technologies, there is no going back.
However the Luddite responds, the wields of the tools of technology always wins the conflict. The technology provides the leverage to overcome resistance to change.
So the investor should focus on which side of history they want to be on. Should they invest in the AI, Crypto, Virtual world future or should they write them off as doomed to be regulated out of existence.
The answer is to watch Crypto. Bitcoin should be dead by now with all the proscription and obvious moves by most major economies to reign it in and in most places cripple it. Yet Bitcoin is not dead and saying this as a still ‘Crypto Bear,’ it is flourishing. Its is close to half way back to its ‘all time high’ and no one can say it wont suddenly rocket higher. That is not a prediction it is an observation that while Crypto is utterly out of fashion, mired in scandal and surrounded be aggressive regulation and in certain corners prosecution, its at levels that would make you imagine it was an investment darling.
This is strong evidence that AI and Metaverse, will also take centre stage alongside Crypto as the wave moulding our near futures and that is where the big money will be.
So don’t focus on the uproar and scandal, turn your FUD filters up and prepare to ride these waves. Don’t leave you good investing principles behind because it is bound to be yet another wild ride. Together Crypto, AI and Metaverse will define the post Covid world.