Winners and Losers and Kevin O'Leary

Why this data center is causing a ruckus
Morning Brew

Northeast Hillsboro, where I live, is getting overrun with data centers. Seems like a new, giant, tilt-wall building goes up every week. I wonder if all this investment is going to pay off. I can see how AI (Artificial Intelligence) can be useful for some things. I ask Google questions and it usually can provide a reasonable answer, and I've seen some clever videos made by AI (I suspect the script came from a human), but nothing that could justify the zillions of dollars being spent on these techno-palaces.

Hillsboro Data Centers
I swear none of these buildings were there last week.

I suspect the biggest use of AI is going to be running voice chat-bots for dealing with customer service calls. And given that the whiz kids have deciphered human speech and can now reproduce most anyone's voice, we are going to see scamming elevated to the next level. And all those call centers in India are likely going to be replaced by chat-bots.

Also, with the proliferation of AI and the abysmally low level of intelligence of the general population, Artificial Intelligence is going to degenerate into Artificial Stupidity,

JMSmith has a philosophical approach to all this. In his latest post he is talking about Kevin O'Leary and ends with this:

It is obvious that life’s losers do not understand the secrets of success.  But it is much less obvious, at least to successful men like Kevin O’Leary, that life’s winners do not understand the secrets of failure.  They imagine they understand failure because they have known low points from which they “bounced back,” but the first secret of failure is that a failure does not bounce.  Life’s losers hit bottom like a bag of sand and not like a basketball.  Losers go plop; winners go boing. Winners think sandbags could bounce if they only tried harder.  Losers think winners are bags, or rather balls, of wind.

Competition is Kevin O’Leary’s god, and I suspect he would be delighted if the nation’s motto were changed to, “In Competition We Trust.”  But he does not understand that Competition looks to life’s losers very much as Yahweh looked to a trembling Amalkite.  He does not understand that most men are not eager to enter a competitive footrace because they are fat, emphysemic, or lacking one leg.   Life’s losers exchange loyalty for protection, not for the right to compete in contests in which they are certain to finish last.

Notes for the uneducated, like me:

Yahweh is the personal name of the God of ancient Israel and Judah, represented by the Hebrew Tetragrammaton (YHWH) and primarily used in the Hebrew Bible. Emerging as a national deity from the Iron Age Levant, Yahweh is identified in scripture as the creator and deliverer of the Israelites, often associated with attributes of power, war, and faithful covenant.

The Amalekites were an ancient, nomadic biblical nation known as persistent enemies of the Israelites, inhabiting the Negev desert south of Canaan. Descended from Esau's grandson Amalek, they were branded as hostile for attacking the vulnerable rear of the Israelite Exodus, leading to a divine decree for their eventual total destruction.