2026/10/27
We're paying a pretty penny for a pig in a poke with investments in quantum computing. It's not clear that quantum computers will work at an economical scale. Furthermore, quantum simulation on classical computers may give the expected advantages of quantum computers with less trouble. And I'm not terribly excited by the limited range of tasks to which quantum computing applies.
In a recent talk, Jack Clark, a cofounder of Anthropic, said that artificial intelligence was a means to evade the end of economic growth. I see the pursuit of AI, quantum computing, and much of the rest of cutting-edge high tech as humanity flailing around, trying to preserve the old system, predicated on perpetual economic growth, instead of getting down to the real work of ending consumer culture and restoring substantive, human goals as the basis for our values.
Its own inventor said that gross domestic product was never intended to express the quality of an economy. Unfortunately, GDP does represent an economy's capacity for transferring profits to rich people. You won't hear much about the need to end hypercapitalism and consumer culture because much of the wealth that exists in the stock market consists of the expectation of profit growth: It's a dream, and vast amounts paper wealth will vanish as soon as we wake up.
The last stage of the disease, before either the fever breaks or the patient dies, is fascism and a desperate attempt to force economic activity out of every possible source. We see the Trump administration, and we see work requirements for Medicaid recipients.
I don't think it will work. I think the longer we postpone the inevitable, the more suffering there will be. I think that neoliberal hypercapitalism was inherently inhumane and destructive of the entire living world from the beginning. Pope Francis was a great spokesman for this point of view.
What can we do? To begin with for people in the Albany, New York, USA area, call for the retirement of George R. Hearst III, publisher of the Times Union; member of its editorial board; member of several important nonprofit boards; scion of the baronially wealthy Hearst family, which makes most of its money these days from owning the financial ratings agency Fitch, along with other business-to-business enterprises; and therefore a person subject to such conflicts of interest as would make his despised ancestor William Randolph blush. I make this suggestion as a person whose writing has appeared many times in the Times Union and who has taken a special interest this past year in how that newspaper is being run.
For general advice on living in the fall of hypercapitalism, please see another of my websites, God Is Poor.