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Today we’re challenging the big tech promise that AI really will make the world a better place.

☕ *knuckle cracks* ☕ Let’s get into it.

Today’s specials:

• No FOMO 🗿: The False Promise of A Tech Utopia

• No FOMO News 📰 : CEO Spent Double Annual Revenue on Private Jet

• AI App of the Week 💻: Personalized Investment Insights

• Reading List 📚 : 10 Good Reads On Today’s Topic

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The False Promise of A Tech Utopia

Tech execs keep telling us how AI will make the world a better place, framing it as a 24/7 human assistant to bring more efficiency and convenience to our lives. But at what point are we paradoxically compromising human prosperity for productivity?

In the 1960s, workers were promised a 4-day work week at the proliferation of computers and eventually personal computers. Today, it could be argued that humans will work more in 2024 than they did in 1964, especially when you consider both parents working instead of one stay-at-home.

History shows us how humans often innovate things based on what’s immediately available, not necessarily based on what’s in our best interest. Progress is not linear, it is logical. The advent of modern farming did well to increase human populations, but it also over-centralized our diets and kept us tied to mundane work routines, whereas our foraging ancestors lived wild and varying lifestyles.

The same could be said about the rollout of Artificial Intelligence. Is it in our best interest to automate everything? Or are we choosing technological advancement at the expense of our freedom? Two paths of progress lie before us, with technology at its core.

Last year, one tech CEO infamously laid off 90% of his support staff – which is reasonable on its own merit – but his justification and handling of the situation is where things got weird.

In a video interview, he went on to say “Yes, this is brutal, if you’re human.”

This thread isn’t about rejecting or criticizing tech advancement. It’s about identifying an optimal path forward for humanity and technology to thrive in harmony.

I highly recommend reading the book “Small is Beautiful” by EF Schumacher. He’s a prominent 20th-century economist who promoted “Technology With A Human Face”, suggesting back in the early 1970s that we should reconsider the economic development of emerging countries and focus on agricultural sectors instead of cities.

He championed the concept of “buddhist economics and suggested how technology can move in line with human progress if we reconsider our measurement quotients for economic growth, putting behind metrics of market success like GDP and Unemployment Rate and measuring instead more sentient concepts like Work Satisfaction and Optimism About The Future as indications of human happiness.

For example, if a new AI tool saves time and money, and hence layoffs 90% of the workforce at a corporation, does that AI tool retain a net positive on humanity, or are we better off letting people maintain their jobs, even if there is a faster and more efficient way?

If we force corporations to keep their workers, how do we prevent worker complacency and not stifle innovation?

I wrote a long-form piece on this topic back in 2020. Very little has changed since. And I don’t expect it to change until tech has delved us so deep into a transhuman dystopia that we revolt and force our way out of it, only to overcorrect ourselves (as humans tend to do) back into an era, as Einstein put it, of sticks and stones.

No Fomo News 📰

AI

• ReALM: Apple’s New AI Model Outperforms GPT-4 (Hyscaler)

• Don’t like your DALL-E images? OpenAI now lets you edit them (Mashable)

• Yahoo is buying Artifact, the AI news app from the Instagram co-founders (TheVerge)

Web3

• a16z Sets the Stage with $75 Million Investment in Web3 Gaming Evolution (BeInCrypto)

• Sam Bankman-Fried speaks out after sentencing: ‘I never thought what I was doing was illegal’ (CT)

Tech

• Canoo spent double its annual revenue on the CEO’s private jet in 2023 (TechCrunch)

• Microsoft to separate Teams and Office globally amid antitrust scrutiny (Reuters)

• Japan approves additional $3.9 billion in subsidies for chip firm Rapidus to meet semiconductor goals (CNBC)

AI App of the Week 💻

AI gets a lot of hype. But how does that help me?

This section is dedicated to No Fomo’s favorite AI tools.

We’ll try to fish for things that make your life easier. Or we’ll give honest, informative reviews of apps capturing Internet attention.

This Week’s App De Jour: Rafa

RAFA's AI Agents provide personalized investment insights, combining expertise in fundamental analysis, technicals, momentum, and more to optimize your portfolio 24/7

Reading List 📚

Here are a few books on our reading list for 2024, many related to today’s topic:

1. Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller Sr. by Ron Chernow

   1. self-explanatory

2. Rabbits: A Novel by Terry Miles

   1. A book about alternate reality / metaverse

3. Modern Classics by Georges Bataille (My Mother, Madame Edwarda, The Dead Man)

4. All I Need Is Love by Klaus Kinski

   1. This book is $584, saw it in a movie

5. Moscow 1812: Napoleon's Fatal March by Adam Zamoyski

   1. What man doesn’t have a Napoleon era

6. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany by William L. Shirer

   1. An special history of Nazi Germany (from what I’m told)

7. One Man’s View of the World by Lee Kuan Yew

   1. An attempt to provide a neutral worldview of global economics – rather than from the perspective of one particular nation

8. Economics in One Lesson: The Shortest and Surest Way to Understand Basic Economics by Henry Hazlitt

   1. Recommended by a respected colleague

9. Understanding Human Nature by Alfred Adler

10. The Courage to Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi, Fumitake Koga

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DISCLAIMER: None of this is financial advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell assets or make financial decisions. Please be careful and do your own research.