Elon Musk, the Crypto Crash and the Imminent AI Takeover: The Technological Chaos of the 2022s Has Drastically Changed Our Lives

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In the early 20th century, long before there was Twitter and the Internet, iPhones and AI, Bitcoin and ChatGPT, when the skies of the Industrial Revolution were filled with black soot and smokestacks and the streets around the world were a cavalcade of trotting horses and carriages, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, then leader of the Bolshevik Revolution and first leader of the Soviet Union, said the following: There are decades when nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades follow one another. If Lenin were alive today, I’m sure the saying would sound a bit more like this: There are minutes when nothing happens; and there are minutes where decades follow one another.

Everything is now an endless scroll that even if you spend an inordinate amount of your day in this vortex of unlimited content, news, videos and gifs, you will still miss a million things. What was once news a day is now a projectile spewed onto the internet a million times an hour. Who do we have to thank for this perpetual anguish? Silicon Valley, of course. And I’m here to tell you it’s about to get worse.

It was the year of technological chaos. Just take a look around the busiest corner of the internet to see how quickly things can change in today’s technoscape. It’s literally less than two months since Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion, and since then more than 5,000 people have been fired from the company (or quit), ad revenue is down as some businesses reportedly lost faith in Musk’s leadership. , the company has changed direction more times than I can count, and Twitter’s net worth, according to analysts, is just $13 billion. By the time I finish writing this column, Musk may no longer be CEO of Twitter (after all, he said, based on a Twitter poll, he would quit when he found a crazy enough replacement to take over).

Of course, Twitter isn’t the only dizzying change of the past year. As of January 1, 2022, a single Bitcoin was worth $47,738.59. Today it has since dropped 65% to be worth just over $16,000 and no one would be surprised if Bitcoin drops to zero or climbs back to $50,000 by the end of 2022. Remember NFTs? At the turn of the year, they were all anyone could talk about. There were monkeys and penguins and movie stills and record albums and twisty lines and John Cleese had an NFT bridge to sell you, and now a lot of that stuff is insolvent or dropped hundreds of millions of dollars. Jack Dorsey’s first tweet was turned into an NFT and bought for $2.9 million in March of last year, and in April of this year was worth just $280. Now the celebrities behind the BAYC, or Bored Ape Yacht Club, including Gwyneth Paltrow, Jimmy Fallon and Guy Oseary, are being sued in a class action lawsuit for urging people to buy losing investments.

At the start of the year, Coinbases stock, which had just gone public a few months earlier, was worth around $250 per share. Today it is down 85% to $34 per share. That’s a drop in market capitalization from $52 billion to $7.8 billion. Tesla’s stock and market value have more than halved over the same period, losing nearly half a trillion dollars. The same goes for Meta, which lost hundreds of billions of dollars after Mark Zuckerberg decided Facebook’s future was the Metaverse, and almost no one on earth agreed with him. The entire NASDAQ composite, which started the year at a high of 15,000 points, is now hovering around around 10,000 compared to the past decade, where the composite went in the completely opposite direction.

There have been upsides in all the tech chaos this year. For decades, we’ve seen tech companies trample on the law, and usually just fuck our customers! and get away with it. And yet, this year, Elizabeth Holmes was found guilty of four counts of fraud and sentenced to more than 11 years in prison for her crimes. over $30 billion at his peak just for effective altruism (as in, he was earning money for giving his all), was also shut down, after bankrupting the company in what appears to be a level disaster Bernie Madoff, allegedly spending billions of dollars of client money.

And then there’s the biggest technological change of the last year, the advent of AI and ChatGPT, which didn’t even exist a month ago, let alone in early 2022. These artificial intelligent technologies may still be in their early stages, but the speed at which they are growing and the impact they could have on jobs (especially white-collar and creative jobs) is truly frightening and should make anyone think twice the world. Seeing ChatGPT write legal briefs, news, and scripts is truly one of the most amazing and terrifying advances in technology I’ve personally seen in the past two decades as a tech journalist.

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