This AI-related article is mildly interesting but also dubious at points. In addition to other issues, it touches on the growing concern surrounding the AI-bubble. Regardless of what AI does or fails to do, this hype alone and the potential for a burst and the economic fallout that results is becoming a substantial story on its own merits.
Again, as someone who has no stocks, bonds, or investment portfolio, it doesn't really matter to me. Where it might affect me is if the crash is severe, there will be less disposable income for people to retain my services. Because most domestic or cottage industry has been destroyed by Western Capitalism, I have to work outside my domestic setting - selling my services to others. It makes me sick to be honest but I have little choice.
And when they take an economic hit and lose some of their disposable income, it affects people like me. Thankfully, since I keep things 'simple' in terms of what I do, I'm usually able to weather the storm in ways larger companies cannot.
The story revisits some of the other recent episodes of technological hype and rightly reminds us that none of these things have played out the way people predicted. There are just too many variables at work. I appreciated those points.
People seem shocked that these technologies are being used for evil things. They have a poor understanding of post-Edenic anthropology. Combine man's propensity for wickedness with power (particularly associated with the love of money) and the formula becomes perilous. These tech leaders and CEO's seem like dysfunctional geeks and were it not for their billions they would be reckoned as losers by most people. Well, some of us still consider them to be. But given their wealth, their imaginations are indulged and their quirky idiosyncrasies become no laughing matter. They don't pull triggers like ISIS bombers or even American pilots, but they wreak massive harm in other ways and history will testify to the carnage they create. When viewed from a macro-level it can be safely said that they are in fact quite evil.
As Doctorow elucidates:
“There is something about being very rich and insulated from the consequences of your actions that makes you solipsistic. You cannot make billions of dollars without hurting lots of people. And you can’t hurt lots of people without, in some sense, believing that they’re not really people.”
There's a good deal to think about here. It's interesting to consider how solipsism takes on a real ethical hue when considered in light billionaire wealth and power. They are completely self-referential and only view their own existence and thoughts as legitimate. And he's absolutely correct in his realization that people get hurt. Donald Trump is another example of this and his life has devastated untold numbers of people. And like these tech leaders he has absolutely no conscience. This is the reprobate mind on full display.
Now, Evangelical financial teachers insist that money is neutral - it can be used for good as much as evil.
But the Scriptures repeatedly condemn riches and tie in a moral component. This tells us that quantity changes the quality of that wealth. Quantity changes the ethical calculations of how the person with the money thinks about themselves, others, and how they interact with the world - never having to struggle or rely on anyone, able to satisfy every whim, never having to deal with the angst associated with insecurity and risk. That's not neutral. And that's also why faith and riches don't go together very well at all.
These so-called Biblical Financial teachers are in fact syncretists, combining bits of (largely out of context) Biblical teaching with Capitalist orthodoxy. In other words they are false teachers, deceived and deceiving others. They are on the airwaves and their materials are used in churches and their thinking dominates the so-called 'Christian' financial advisors whose signs you see while driving about.
It's judgment against them that this lost person has more perception on this issue. His language is more in keeping with what we find in the prophets and apostles than what I hear on Christian radio. You don't acquire that kind of wealth without stepping on people and exploiting them.
And then to make it even worse - and I've encountered this numerous times as of late, the argument is then made with regard to stewardship. God has given you your wealth and now you have to use it to his glory by investing it, giving some away, etc.
How does a thief steward the money he stole and glorify God with how he distributes his loot? It's absurd. Is legitimacy something made by man's laws or is it something that's reckoned in terms of what God commands?
I'm reminded of James and his condemnation of the rich who kept back wages. More than once I've heard sermons in which the suggestion is made that this is in reference to an employer who violates his contractual obligations and doesn't pay the workers the promised wage. I would note it's the kind of thing Donald Trump is notorious for.
But I contend that's not what James is talking about. It could be that the fraudulent employer is paying out simply less than what was promised. It's more likely that he's holding back and delaying payment causing hardship for the workers, or playing games with fees, deductions or whatever - practices that are standard and legal in capitalist economies, and yet completely unethical. All too often I feel like that's my daily bread. Those Christians who engage in such practices or work for such practitioners of these methods should re-think what they're doing. For my part I want nothing to do with such people which is a problem because they're everywhere in the Church.
Or is it in fact a reference to what we might call a fair wage? A wage a person can actually live on and support a family?
The market won't sustain it many argue and that's as good as gospel for most Western Christians. They seem to think economic laws are self-evident and somehow divorced from ethical framing. To argue against the market is like trying to defy gravity. Christians therefore can't be held accountable to what is effectively a law of nature.
And as we all know 'stewardship' is connected to efficiency or lack of waste. To live by an inefficient model would be sin - right?
What if in fact the New Testament assumes we will 'lose' at every turn and if we live by the ethic of putting the interest of others above ourselves we will pay a price?
That would be foolishness. I've heard many a Reformed teacher say so despite the fact that's exactly what the New Testament teaches and declares that in doing so we are more than conquerors. I wonder sometimes if these people actually read their Bibles?
They also seem to have forgotten what the New Testament teaches about foolishness or rather perceived foolishness as it is seen in the eyes of the world.
Albert Barnes (1798-1870) offers these comments in connection to the James passage - he speaks of slaves and freemen which is not surprising given he was a well known abolitionist. And yet how many 'free' people living under contemporary capitalism are in fact enslaved - in a manner of speaking? Through debt and other traps, they are not free to quit their jobs or say 'no'. Well, they can but they'll pay a terrible price. In some cases they exacerbate their problems by poor choices or a desire for a higher standard of living (marketed to them through Madison Avenue deceit) but this does not exonerate those who sit atop the system or the ethical implications associated with their wealth, and the way they use others in order to amass it. Consider Barnes on James 5.4:
"It will apply, in an eminent degree, to those who hold others in slavery, and who live by their unrequited toils. The very essence of slavery is, that the slave shall produce by his labor so much more than he receives for his own maintenance as to support the master and his family in indolence. The slave is to do the work which the master would otherwise be obliged to do; the advantage of the system is supposed to be that the master is not under a necessity of laboring at all. The amount which the slave receives is not presumed to be what is a fair equivalent for what he does, or what a freeman could be hired for; but so much less than his labor is fairly worth, as to be a source of so much gain to the master. If slaves were fairly compensated for their labor; if they received what was understood to be a just price for what they do, or what they would be willing to bargain for if they were free, the system would at once come to an end. No owner of a slave would keep him if he did not suppose that out of his unrequited toil he might make money, or might be relieved himself from the necessity of labor. He who hires a freeman to reap down his fields pays what the freeman regards as a fair equivalent for what he does; he who employs a slave does not give what the slave would regard as an equivalent, and expects that what he gives will be so much less titan an equivalent, that he may be free alike from the necessity of labor and of paying him what he has fairly earned. The very essence of slavery, therefore, is fraud; and there is nothing to which the remarks of the apostle here are more applicable than to that unjust and oppressive system."
It's not fully applicable but interesting to say the least - something to reflect on. There might be more there than what seems to be at first glance.
There is also something that happens in connection to wealth. The rich can throw their weight around as they are not afraid of the consequences. They can file lawsuits generating great anguish and yet for them the costs are mere pocket change. The poor suffer indignities and abuse because they cannot afford to retaliate. They are humiliated.
Contrary to the litigation-loving culture of modern Evangelicalism and the broken Constitutional system of the United States which all but requires litigation to challenge laws - that's a door that's closed to New Testament Christians. We will not flourish in this mammon-society but at the same time we shouldn't support a system that is literally built to aid the rich and crush the poor - a system destined to become a plutocratic oligarchy. This is not Christian nor ever can be.
At this point many will point to Christ's parable concerning the labourers as if it somehow discounts the notion of an ethic tied to a fair wage. Any negotiated wage is fair they argue but I contend that reading the parable in such a way is to read it as a lost person. The parables are revealing Kingdom mysteries. They are presented in a way that a lost person taking them at face value will completely misunderstand. They will think Jesus was teaching about agricultural practices, animal husbandry, or finance. These stories which often don't make sense in terms of normal practice nevertheless reveals truths about grace, mercy, and the love of God.
To say that Christ was suggesting that any negotiated wage is a fair and ethical one leaving an employer off the hook is to miss the point about the parable which testifies to grace. Do these same people insist that it's sin to use pesticide or to weed your garden? After all let the wheat and tares grow together, right?
Christ isn't providing gardening advice or giving instruction regarding investment or labour laws. This is to miss the point and read the parable as those who don't understand his words.
Returning to Doctorow, he touches on Elon Musk and his tendency to live in a self-created bubble. He lacks empathy and increasingly is incapable of it - a trait associated with sociopaths who see themselves as moral and justified in all they do and above the burden of accountability laid upon others. If Musk was a poor Black man from Mobile, Alabama he might (with that mindset) be doing a stint in a state prison. Such places are filled with people who think in these terms. But he has money and so (like Trump) he can live by his own rules and he doesn't care who he hurts along the way, who he uses, who gets trampled or thrown away.
Why aren't Christians talking about these things? Do you think if more Christians understood something of these matters they might think twice about their political efforts and alliances?
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