Ai

Bernie Sanders has been rolling out political hot takes for more than half a century, and in recent years his familiar socialist prescriptions have found a new focus: artificial intelligence. In 2023 he argued that workers who use it should be entitled to a four-day week. In October of last year he called on corporations who employ AI to be hit with a “robot tax”. And, just last month, he made his punchiest proposal yet: a complete moratorium on all AI data centers. In a characteristically plaintive video address, the Vermont Senator argued that halting data center construction would "give democracy a chance to catch up," preventing the benefits of AI from being monopolized by "the wealthiest people on Earth.

Allow me to add an additional downer note to this grimmest of news days: iRobot, the company that manufactures Roombas, has declared bankruptcy. iRobot said it will continue to update and provide technical support for the devices, so there will be no “bricking.” They will continue to function, just like ghosts continue to haunt the homes in which they once lived. But there’s definitely a brick in the hearts today of the customers who’ve loved their robot vacuums since the 1990s, not to mention the cats who loved to ride them, the dogs that loved to chase them around the house, and the people who loved to watch videos of animals doing those things. In many ways, the world has passed by the Roomba.

Aside from streaming on an iPad, when riding a stationary bike one of the few entertainments on offer is tracking your heart rate. Breaking 150 beats per minute provides a fleeting (and doubtless misplaced) sense of achievement. Yet the wearable heart monitor that came with my exercise bicycle proved unreliable; one’s BPM never truly drops from 137 to 69 in one second. This is all to explain why I bought the fitness freak’s fetish: an Apple watch. Its heart rate monitors are accurate. I opted for a reconditioned older model, not only half the price of the new ones but inclusive of the pulse oximeter function, which a medical technology suit has forced Apple to eliminate in current American models until the litigant’s patent runs out in 2028.

There has been much wallowing over news that Amazon and UPS have each just cut 14,000 jobs. Some Amazon employees report of being fired with all the heartlessness you might expect in a world where tech has taken over: by automated email. Maybe it was even AI which handpicked them to be de-emphasized, to use that dreaded 1990s expression. This, then, seems to be the future: where an elite of AI entrepreneurs grow rich while the rest of us slop off into idleness and unemployment. So much for those who have been gleefully predicting the implosion of the AI boom. Nvidia has just been revealed to be the world’s first $5 trillion company, with a market capitalization greater than the whole of Germany.