Those Who Can’t Do, Do AI

“Do you sincerely want to be rich?” That was the question posed by Bernie Cornfeld, an infamous American huckster, who, in the 1960s, set up a scheme to help American ex-pats and military servicemen invest in a way that avoided income tax. The extremely popular scheme — Investors Overseas Services — went caput, naturally. Cornfeld was arrested, sentenced and then mysteriously acquitted. He lived as a rich man until the 1990s, while his customers, many of whom lost their savings, did not. Cornfeld’s customers sincerely wanted to be rich, as did Cornfeld himself. In fact, most of us do. It is quite a natural way of existing in our ultra-competitive, capitalistic society. The nature of the finance system, as it exists, means there will inevitibly be a cottage industry of people whose business concept is merely selling the idea of wealth. From Charles Ponzi to the multi-level marketers of the modern world, hope is a hell of a drug. I’ve noticed, in the past few years, that occasionally products spring up that seem to capture this impulse. The most obvious one is cryptocurrency, which was swept along on a tide of people — who were not rich, at that point — wanting to become rich. The reality was that few of them were engaged in the technology of crypto and few of them understood the economics. But what they saw was a commodity being traded from a nil value to a huge one. It opened up the world of commodities trading to people who didn’t have the capacity to buy and sell barrels of oil or LNG, who didn’t have the capital to purchase gold or copper, or the wherewithal for corn or coffee or soy. And even if it was seen as a currency exchange, rather than a commodities trade, the barriers to entry were still frighteningly low: new coins could come around every day and for tiny punts you could buy a chance at becoming a fiat millionaire. People who’d spent a lifetime playing the lottery now had an option that came both with better odds and the cachet of professionalism.

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