Tech

The Ghost Ledger is (Almost) Live

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The real Ghost Ledger that is.

The Clarity Act failed to pass cloture yesterday on the Senate floor.

The core idea behind the Clarity Act is to clearly define how the government would approach different types of cryptocurrencies and blockchain projects, and give specific roles to the regulatory agencies, including new authority for the CFTC to be a watchdog for crypto spot markets. — CoinDesk

Senator John Kennedy believes the bill isn’t dead. He said he wasn’t surprised by the vote, but that “it’s gonna have to wait until the lame duck session.”

It was unlikely that Democrats would approve anything that President Trump could point to as a victory this close to midterms, in spite of the fact that they essentially got all of the changes to the bill they asked for.

This bill does not specifically apply to Bitcoin, which in my article Bitcoin Brain, I defined as something of a blockchain red herring. This bill is about the rails underneath the coming financial system. It never mentions ISO 20022 (the messaging standard the banks have already moved onto) but it decides which tokens are securities under the SEC and which are digital commodities under the CFTC, which is the question the SEC and CFTC already answered for the ISO 20022 coins like XRP in a joint interpretation this March — this bill would write it into law.


Running a validator or staking to secure a network would not, on its own, count as a securities transaction. Exchanges couldn’t pay yield on stablecoins just sitting in your account, but rewards tied to actually using them would still be allowed. Clear rules of the road — the thing institutional money has been waiting on.

The SEC and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) have stated that they are moving forward with their own regulations and rules on the implementation of this technology into the financial system.

Adoption is inevitable.

Along with the ‘mainstreaming’ that is going on, certain influencers seem to have gotten the call that the time to inject this into the collective consciousness has arrived. Including Alex Jones. Alex famously states that he predicted 9/11. My question in response to that is, who gave him that information? He’s been a vessel for seeding information prior to significant events for decades, and now he has this to say:

This is ironic to me, as The Art of the Empire’s in-universe conspiracy podcaster, Dax Winters, interviewed a man who created a technology not dissimilar from the XRP Ledger. It happens in chapter 16 of The Ghost Ledger, book one of The Art of the Empire series.

In some ways, it feels like the book has either predicted this, or memed it into existence. Of course, I say that with all due humility.

And for those interested, the first draft of its anticipated sequel, Project Naked Sky, has been completed, with a launch date that may still make the end of the year. The surge in post-production work on the manuscript is partly to blame for the reduction in publishing on this site the past few days. 

Check out Dax Winters of The Dax Winters Experience interviewing Jonah Kaplan of SunChain Ledger from The Ghost Ledger for a little humor, and a breakdown of the possibilities offered by distributed ledger technology:

The Dax Winters Experience #1206: THE ALCHEMIST – Featuring Jonah Kaplan 

Dax leaned into the desk; fingers interlocked.

“Tonight’s conversation isn’t about Bitcoin. It’s not about Dogecoin. It’s not about your favorite meme token of the month. It’s about what happens after all that. When crypto doesn’t just interrupt the financial system, it becomes it.”

He tapped the desk lightly. No theatrics — just message.

“My guest tonight isn’t trying to build a fanbase. He’s trying to rewire the financial nervous system of the entire world. If he’s right, we’re looking at the end of capital bottlenecks, settlement delays, and debt as we know it. If he’s wrong… he’s just the smartest lunatic I’ve ever had on.”

He smiled faintly.

“Either way, you’re going to want to pay attention.”

The screen split.

On the left: Dax in perfect studio lighting, sharp and composed. On the right: a dim office space — a converted lab turned cryptographers sandbox, cluttered but functional, lit by half-watt fluorescents and the soft blink of diagnostic LEDs.

Jonah Kaplan looked like he’d been dragged off a quantum rail project mid-debug.

Faded hoodie. Wireframe glasses. Hair half-tied back. He was scribbling on a tablet with one hand and adjusting something off-screen with the other when he noticed the stream was live.

“Jonah,” Dax said, grinning. “You’re with us.”

Jonah looked up. “One sec. The cooling node on the validator rig just threw a spike. Probably nothing, but I’d rather not start a fire during the interview.”

He leaned out of frame. A sharp metal clack, then silence.

“There we go,” he said, slipping the tablet off. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to be rude.”

“No worries,” Dax said. “You’re famously terrible at introductions. So, I’ll do it.”

He turned slightly toward the camera.

“This is Jonah Kaplan. Some of you know the name. Most of you have no idea how close this guy came to getting disappeared by the same people who now host blockchain conferences for G7 countries. He built the SunChain Ledger. He’s the architect behind its native token, the RAY protocol. He walked away from a classified DARPA lab project in 2014 and started uploading pseudonymous whitepapers that half the industry dismissed — until his code started exposing all the warts in commercial payment rails.”

Dax leaned back, letting that settle.

“He’s not here to pump anything. He’s here because he understands what the world is choking on — and what might clear the air.”

He turned to the screen. “Jonah. Let’s cut through the buzzwords. What is SunChain?”

Jonah nodded once, as if flipping a mental switch.

“It’s a distributed ledger system optimized for frictionless settlement. Global, instant, trustless.”

“Okay,” Dax said, “Talk to me like I’m a CFO. What’s it actually do?”

“It replaces the financial middle layer,” Jonah replied. “All of it. No more days-long wire transfers. No more Swift. No more needing Visa to approve a purchase at midnight on a weekend. If I send money to you across the world — it settles instantly. No bank has to ‘clear it.’ The validators handle that.”

“And what are validators?”

“Decentralized nodes,” Jonah said. “No central server. No third-party clearinghouse. Each node verifies transactions independently. If enough of them agree — the network accepts it as true. The transaction locks in.”

“Why does that matter?”

Jonah’s eyes lit slightly.

“Because right now, we have trillions of dollars locked in escrow accounts. Corporations, banks, governments — they all keep money parked just to cover delays and settlement lag. SunChain removes the lag. That capital comes back online.”

Dax whistled softly. “You’re saying it frees up—”

“Global liquidity,” Jonah said. “That’s the first domino.”

Dax leaned back. “But hang on — for the folks at home who think blockchain is just internet monopoly money — break it down real simple. What is this thing?”

Jonah’s eyes lit up slightly, shifting into teacher mode.

“Think of it like a ledger — a record book. But instead of one bank keeping their own private ledger that only they control, this ledger is copied across thousands of computers worldwide. Every transaction gets recorded on all of them simultaneously. You can’t forge an entry because everyone has the same copy. You can’t delete history because it’s written everywhere at once. And you can’t shut it down because there’s no central office to raid.”

“So, it’s like if everyone in town had an identical copy of the same checkbook, and they all had to agree before any check cleared?”

“Exactly. Except the whole world is the town. And once something’s written, it’s there forever.”

Dax nodded. “And the RAY token?”

“We called it RAY — Reciprocal Asset Yield. Because that’s what this is. Not interest. Not speculation. But a mutual return. You bring value into this ecosystem — RAY makes sure it’s reflected back.”

Jonah adjusted his glasses before continuing.

“It does that because it’s the transfer medium,” Jonah said. “You use RAY to bridge currencies, move value, tokenize assets. And I don’t just mean money. Real Estate. Commodities. Contracts. A shipment of wheat. An intellectual property license. A national bond. If it can be tracked or priced — it can be tokenized and traded 24/7 with no intermediary.”

“You’re talking about a 24/7 global trading desk for everything,” Dax said.

“Yes,” Jonah said. “On-chain, in real time, with zero counterparty risk.”

“Debt?” Dax asked.

Jonah didn’t blink.

“Already solved.”

“No shit? Go on.”

“We tokenize it. The U.S. doesn’t need to owe China anymore. Think Digital Treasuries issued as blockchain assets — fully transparent, interest-bearing, with built-in terms. America can sell that debt on a global market instantly. Anyone in the world can hold a piece; sovereigns, investment banks, retail traders. You remove the geopolitical hostage element — and you gain velocity.”

Dax narrowed his eyes.

“What about the fifty billion RAY tokens still locked up in escrow? You’re telling me SunChain Labs doesn’t control more than half the total supply?”

Jonah didn’t flinch.

“That escrow exists for a reason — over-the-counter sales, seeding the ecosystem, supporting startups that build on our rails. Those coins are time-released. No dumping, no market shock. Structured allocation only.”

Dax cocked his head to the side.

“To who?”
 Dax pressed him.

“Is it major banks? Remittance networks. Institutional partners. I’ve heard some big players are already under NDA. But I’ve seen names — Western Union, Wall Street firms… even the Fed has been floating the idea of replacing SWIFT.”

Dax shook his head slightly and continued.

“I mean, all of that said, RAY is sitting there at thirty-seven cents right now. Some people think it’s a dead coin.”

The left side of Jonah’s mouth curled slightly.

“There are real-world use cases for RAY, including the ones you just alluded to. Several adoption agreements are waiting on regulatory frameworks. I can’t comment beyond that.”

Dax paused. A silence, weighty and measured, then he spoke.

“Let me tell you who’s trying to hold them.”

The lighting on Dax’s side of the screen dimmed a touch. The studio map shifted — red pulses overtaking blue on the LED screen.

“You think the people at the World Economic Forum haven’t heard this pitch? You think the bankers don’t want real-time settlements — as long as they decide what settles and who gets to transact?”

He held up a finger.

“CBDCs. Central Bank Digital Currencies. Sound familiar? Same tech. Different leash. Instead of open, neutral, and voluntary — it’s mandatory, programmable, and surveilled. You post the wrong meme? They freeze your account. You didn’t take your booster? You can’t board the train.”

Jonah stayed silent. He knew this part of the conversation was de rigueur for a Dax show appearance.

“This interview isn’t about crypto,” Dax said, turning back to the lens. “It’s about control. Either we build a system that liberates… or they’ll build one that enslaves.”

He tapped the desk once more. Quiet.

“You have the map now. Choose your path wisely.”

The screen faded to black.

X Money X Problems

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This week X, formerly Twitter, began the rollout of X Money. This has been something I have been anticipating since Elon Musk purchased Twitter for $44 billion in 2022.

“X Money is designed to make traditional bank accounts unnecessary for users.” — The Paypers

X Money is not simply a feature of X, but may be the reason Elon acquired the social media platform to begin with. Elon had originally envisioned X.com as a payments system all the way back in 1999. The concept behind it would go on to become PayPal. Elon has long understood the potential for innovation and opportunity when payments and finance finally merge with technology in a truly meaningful way. Far beyond the reaches of what CashApp and PayPal offer today.

X is positioning itself to become the WeChat of the rest of the world.

WeChat is China’s everything app, and has been for over a decade. Tencent launched it as a messaging service in 2011. Today it runs about 1.43 billion monthly users. It’s messaging, it’s a social feed, it’s video, and it’s WeChat Pay — roughly 935 million people paying for things by scanning a QR code, from a department store checkout down to a guy selling fruit off a cart. But the part Americans consistently miss is Mini Programs. These are app-like services that run inside WeChat itself, 4.3 million of them, used by around 945 million people a month. You book the doctor, hail the cab, pay the power bill, order dinner, buy the movie ticket, and file your government paperwork without ever leaving the app or downloading a single thing. You don’t have twelve apps, twelve logins, and twelve saved credit cards. You have one.

Yes, the Chinese version is restrictive, surveillance heavy, and censored. That’s not the part I’m pointing at. The singular model is the point. Whether we end up with their version of it here is a separate question.

Nobody in the West has built it — not because it can’t be built, but because the pieces were always owned by different companies with no reason to cooperate. Apple owns the wallet. Meta owns the social graph. Your bank owns the settlement layer. Elon is the first person sitting on all three at once.

X Money is offering Premium users 4% on their Stored Value Accounts and to its Premium+ users, 6%. Yes, 6% on cash you have parked in the X account, and they’re issuing digital debit cards and physical metal Visa cards. The card drops into Apple Pay and Google Pay, and a virtual version is issued the moment you sign up, so you’re spending before the metal one hits your mailbox. Not in New York, though — no money transmitter license there, which means no APY at all for New York residents. Massachusetts is out entirely. It’s live in 41 states plus D.C.

They have also partnered with Cross River Bank as their sponsor bank. X isn’t a bank and doesn’t hold a charter, so Cross River provides the charter, the FDIC-insured deposits, the compliance backbone and the payment rails. This is the banking-as-a-service model, and Cross River is effectively the bank behind fintech — a state-chartered New Jersey outfit in Fort Lee running more than 120 clients including Stripe, Affirm, Coinbase, Best Egg and Upstart on an $8 billion balance sheet. If you’ve ever financed a purchase through Affirm or moved money through Coinbase, Cross River probably executed it and you never knew their name. Deposits are insured to $250,000, with up to $10 million available through a cash sweep across partner institutions.

And the Stored Value Account doesn’t have to stop at cash. Right now X is paying 4% to Premium and 6% to Premium+ on dollars parked in the app. Let users hold stablecoins in that same account and the yield options widen considerably — tokenized Treasuries, on-chain lending, staking proof-of-stake assets like Ethereum or Solana. Your checking account, your savings account, and your brokerage stop being three separate things you log into.

There has been talk about “paying in crypto” with X Money, but I think that is the wrong angle to look at this. The GENIUS Act that passed in July 2025 by the US and signed by President Trump allows for a company like X to issue its own stablecoin, a cryptocurrency pegged one-to-one to a dollar and backed by reserves the issuer is legally obligated to redeem at face value, but they don’t even need to do that. They can allow X users to hold existing stablecoins (RLUSD, USDC) in their X value accounts, then transact them with merchants, peers, make payments, settling them with a blockchain like Solana, Ripple or Stellar as the middle layer. This will happen instantly and appear just as normal to someone as your standard PayPal transaction, but real-time settlement, with negligible fees on a ledger that confirms it for both sides. The change isn’t sending .0001 Bitcoin or Ethereum to pay for your burrito bowl, it’s that you don’t even see that layer underneath.

Innovation’s most bearish babe, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, wrote Musk in April flagging what she called a “suspicious carveout” that lets a private commercial company like X issue its own stablecoin, and noted that Thune had blocked a bipartisan floor amendment to close it. She’s right about the mechanism. She’s just wrong about which part should worry anyone.

When you swipe a card today, the transaction looks instant. It isn’t. What happened was an authorization — a promise. The real money moves later, batched overnight, run through the card network, settled between the merchant’s bank and yours over the next day or three. Venmo and Cash App are the same trick. Your balance updates the second you hit send because the app is just moving a number from one row of its own ledger to another row of its own ledger. The actual dollars are still sitting at a bank, waiting on ACH.

Distributed ledger technology collapses all of it. The transfer is the settlement. There is no authorization, then clearing, then settlement — there’s one event on a ledger both sides can verify, running 24 hours. That’s the important change. Not the currency, the plumbing. If it seems inconsequential, it frees up trillions of dollars in capital currently kept in limbo when done at scale.

X Money can put that in the palm of your hand. (Yes, perhaps like the Mark of the Beast.)

The move could potentially merge banking, investing, social media and AI into a singular app.

“When I say payments, I actually mean someone’s entire financial life.” — Elon Musk

The concept of the “everything app” is the next evolution in the “everything phone,” the smart phone. A smart-app that allows users to go back and forth between all of these aspects seamlessly, when done well, reduces friction to such a degree that adoption becomes inevitable.

The future is already being born. The good thing about it is that it only comes one day at a time.

Photo: Daniel Oberhaus, CC BY-SA 4.0

Bitcoin Brain

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Many people who I admire as intelligent thinkers and creative minds suffer from a key blind spot I see occurring repeatedly. From Andrew Torba, Jay Dyer and Sam Hyde — they all carry a condition I describe as Bitcoin Brain. Or as the crypto community outside the Bitcoin bubble refers to them, Bitcoin Maxis.

Through this condition, which as it appears to me is caused by having bought into Bitcoin, or BTC, at a significantly lower price, realized 50-200x gains on the asset, and now have a devotion to it that causes all criticism of it to put them into a state of cognitive dissonance.

Just mentioning use cases for other cryptocurrency projects can trigger an adverse reaction. Bring up ISO 20022-compliant utility tokens in a social setting and you’ll more often than not hook a maxi who will launch into a myopic BTC fueled diatribe that lays out several of the arguments I’ll counter in this article.

To be clear, this is not financial advice. Nothing here is a price prediction. We could see a $200k, $300k, $400k Bitcoin, depending on how much institutional money comes into the asset in the near term.

Price is not the argument I’m making. What I’m interested in is the shifting paradigm — that a first generation technology from 2009, one that is slower, more expensive, and has fewer real world uses than what came after it, is still being sold to us as a revolutionary force in the future of global finance.

There is a maximum supply cap of twenty-one million Bitcoins. This is often one of the first points made by the champions of the token, scarcity.

There is a finite amount of gold. There is a finite amount of silver. There is a finite amount of beachfront property in Malibu. And there is a finite amount of Bitcoin. All four of those are true, but one of these things is not like the other.

Gold is scarce because it can’t be manufactured. You cannot copy the periodic table, change one line, and roll out Gold 2 with an extra 21 million tons.

There are other cryptos. And it isn’t just that they exist — it’s that they already do things Bitcoin is technologically incapable of doing. Foreign exchange that happens damn near instantly. Payments that settle across the world in seconds for a fraction of a penny. Commodities trading around the clock with a record of every transaction that’s open for anyone to inspect and impossible to go back and doctor.

So sure, you could build Bitcoin 2 and mint yourself another 21 million tokens. But why would you want to? You’d be launching a brand new product that’s already a generation behind the competition. Nobody would give it a second look.

And that says something very damning about the asset.

The original pitch, the one that made every libertarian I know fall in love, was peer-to-peer electronic cash outside the money printing governments and their fiat system.

It doesn’t do that and it never really did. Transactions take ten minutes to confirm and about an hour before anyone serious calls them final, fees float on congestion, and nobody is buying a latte with it.

The fix that BTC developers promised for eight years running has been the Lightning Network, where payments happen off-chain and settle in bulk later. On paper it solves the problem in an inefficient way. In practice, the node count continues to decrease, inhibiting its ability to ever operate at scale. But as is often the case with Bitcoin, the goal posts have already been moved. The pitch now is that it’s a “store of value,” not currency, not a payments network. When has a store of value been so volatile?

While we’re doing inventory, there’s the matter of what’s been buying all this. Tether is the largest stablecoin on earth and for years people have wondered whether every digital dollar it issues actually is backed by a real one. The stablecoins can then be used in transactions to trade for Bitcoin.

In 2021 that got answered twice. New York settled with them over misrepresenting the backing, and the CFTC found Tether had enough actual cash to cover the tokens on about a quarter of the days they examined.

“Tether reserves were not ‘fully-backed’ the majority of the time.” — CFTC

They paid, admitted nothing, and publish quarterly reports now. But it’s why, every time the market rips and somebody notices Tether minted another billion the week before, people get squinty. Bitcoin Maxis have frequently responded to this by saying some variation of, “if the Federal Reserve can print money, why can’t we?” These are supposed to be the adults in the room in the blockchain space?

That era is ending anyway. The GENIUS Act puts stablecoins under real federal rules by January 2027 — dollar-for-dollar reserves and audited books. What happens when Bitcoin’s money printer gets shut off?

This is part of the new arc for Bitcoin. It was the money you didn’t need permission to use. Now its loudest defenders spend their days begging Fortune 500 companies to put it on their balance sheets and are lobbying Washington to stockpile it.

Bitcoin has the earmarks of a brand-name, trillion-dollar pump and dump, and it traces back to its strange origins and the host of shady players acting on its behalf.


Michael Saylor’s pitch boils down to: who cares what it costs today when it’s going to be worth millions later? He’s even put a number on it.

“Every Bitcoin you don’t buy today is going to cost you $13 million.” — Michael Saylor

That isn’t an argument. It’s a forecast, and you’re expected to take his word for it.

Saylor is also not a new character, which is the part nobody brings up. In March of 2000, at the peak of dot-com mania, his company announced it had to restate two years of financials. The stock went from $333 a share to $86 in a single day.

The SEC charged him with accounting fraud that December. He settled and admitted nothing. For a stretch there he was the single biggest loser of the entire bubble — his stake went from roughly $10 billion to $566 million.

Twenty-five years later he runs the same company under a new name and has bet all of it on one asset. Strategy holds roughly 840,000 Bitcoin (4% of the total possible supply) at an average cost around $75,000 a coin. Bitcoin is currently in the low $60Ks.

He also said for six straight years that he would never sell, that anyone who sells is weak. This month’s filing shows him selling Bitcoin to buy back his own preferred stock.

The engine that made the whole thing work was the premium. His stock traded at a big multiple to the Bitcoin behind it, so he could print shares, buy coins, and somehow end up with more Bitcoin per share than he started with. That premium is gone.

And since Saylor has admitted Bitcoin would trade lower without his weekly bid, the biggest buyer on earth flipping into a seller is not a small thing.

Then there’s Satoshi Nakamoto. That’s the name on the whitepaper that started all of this back in 2008. He built the thing, ran it for two years, answered questions on message boards, then stopped writing in 2011 and was never heard from again. Nobody knows who he is. Nobody knows if he’s one person or several.

He also has about a million coins that he mined himself in the early days, roughly five percent of every Bitcoin that will ever exist. Sixty-some billion dollars. It has not moved in fifteen years. The price has gone through the roof four separate times and he never touched a dime of it.

Three ways to explain that. He lost the keys, he’s dead, or he isn’t a person at all.

In 1996, twelve years before any of this, the NSA published a paper called “How to Make a Mint: The Cryptography of Anonymous Electronic Cash.” It walks through how you’d go about building an untraceable digital currency. They also designed the mathematical lock the whole system still runs on.

That’s not proof of anything. But if you’re asking who could invent a global currency, launch it, walk away and never once get caught, the list is short and they’re on it.

Here’s why that matters beyond being a fun theory. If Satoshi is a man, five percent of the supply is a mystery. If Satoshi is an agency, five percent of the supply is a loaded gun. Sit on it for thirty years while the thing gets baked into pension funds and corporate balance sheets and the national reserve, then wake up the wallet and cash in.

The mother of all rug pulls. And you’d never see it coming, because you never knew who was holding it.

The founder of the world’s most valuable monetary network being permanently and conveniently missing gets filed by his followers as epic mythology, not as the enormous red flag it is.

Along those lines, in 2014 Jeffrey Epstein put about half a million into Blockstream’s seed round, the company employing some of the most influential contributors to Bitcoin’s code. He also cut MIT a check that landed in 2015, right when the Bitcoin Foundation went broke and the developers maintaining the code had no employer. The lab picked up three of them.

“I have spoken to some of the founders of Bitcoin who are very excited.” — Jeffrey Epstein

Nobody involved has been accused of wrongdoing, and none of this means Epstein controlled Bitcoin. But at the most fragile moment in the network’s history — no foundation, no money, a handful of guys with the keys to the codebase — the man paying the bills was Jeffrey Fucking Epstein?

How could a decentralized, borderless currency be an asset to someone running an international human trafficking and blackmail ring?

Then there’s the quantum problem. Google researchers put out estimates this year suggesting a quantum computer could crack Bitcoin’s security faster than the network can produce a single block. Roughly a third of all coins are sitting in the kind of accounts where that’s a live concern, ‘Satoshi’s’ included.

So a proposal went up in April to phase out the vulnerable accounts and eventually freeze the coins of anyone who doesn’t move theirs in time.

Freeze the accounts. The unchangeable ledger with the rules nobody can touch is now having a public argument about icing out a third of the supply. They have once again lost the plot.

So where does this land? Two of BTC’s biggest problems, transaction cost and speed, are already solved. Just not by Bitcoin.

Wrap it, or tokenize it, and settle it on a distributed ledger built for payments and it clears in seconds for a fraction of a penny. The XRP Ledger does it, Stellar does it, and DTCC has already named both in its tokenization patent.

Bitcoin Maxis prefer to position it as the only crypto that will be left standing, keeping the blinders up is key, because the world realizing its limitations is a pitfall that shatters the illusion.

And when it happens, the price of Bitcoin will no longer be what drives the asset class at large.

Bitcoin being decoupled from the rest of the cryptocurrency space as the real-world adoption of utility coins (things that actually solve trillion-dollar problems) leads the way will spark one of the largest mass-hysteria events we’ve seen as Bitcoin Maxis attempt to rationalize what has come to pass.

Bitcoin has been a mainstream media marketing campaign. It has been a successful red herring designed to avert the attention of the masses while the rails of a new financial system using distributed ledger, smart contract and blockchain technology are being built with little fanfare outside of the crypto sphere. (Make no mistake, the smart money is not going to miss the boat on this.)

It’ll most likely always be around. As I stated, it may shatter through all-time-highs in the interim, but there will be a paradigm shift.

There is serious institutional, political, and potentially dark-money pressure to continue propping up the mirage. But in the end, I do believe Bitcoin will be remembered at best as the VCR of cryptocurrency, at worst as a multi-trillion dollar capital extraction conspiracy.

Photo: Gage Skidmore / CC BY-SA 2.0

Sex Ed

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I’m reminded of the age old question: who is going to teach our kids when there are no more young people willing to martyr themselves for the sake of the profession?

The answer is: The Sex Robots.

A WESTERN NEW YORK school district has halted its plans to place a humanoid robot in a classroom after a New York Focus report on the plan sparked fierce debate over the use of artificial intelligence in schools and backlash from local parents. Salamanca City Central School District announced in a Facebook post Friday afternoon that its pilot project with tech company Realbotix has been put on hold as school officials “work through enhanced student data privacy agreements” with the state education agency and engage with community members… In April 2024 (Realbotix), it acquired Simulcra, the Las Vegas parent company behind RealDoll, which creates hyperrealistic sex dolls.

— New York Focus

This story lept out at me before the uproar even had time to begin. One of those comically incompetent decisions that only gets made by the most highly-educated individuals.

Upon seeing the aesthetic of the device, I became more concerned for the robot’s safety than that of the high school students.

Machine Yearning

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Stories like these are becoming more frequent, and beginning to poke holes in the infallibility of AI.

Forrester’s survey of leaders found 55 percent of employers regret making tech-driven staff cuts — leading its analysts to predict that half of AI-attributed layoffs will be “quietly reversed.”
 — Inc.

While AI may be inevitable in displacing large swaths of the labor market, whether it can reach that scale before this current AI market-bubble pops is another question entirely.

“Mistakenly, we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and ingesting the design requirements that we had, that would produce a high-quality product,” said Charles Poon, Ford’s VP of vehicle hardware engineering.
 — Quartz 

The good news is this means more human jobs, the bad news is they probably won’t go to Americans anyways.

As the World Churns

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Netflix has expanded its acquisition of AI software tools.

Netflix has officially closed a monumental deal to acquire InterPositive, the stealth artificial intelligence filmmaking startup founded by Hollywood veteran Ben Affleck. The streaming giant paid $587 million USD for the acquisition….. The system is trained strictly on a project’s own dailies to maintain strict visual logic, helping crews fix continuity errors, handle complex wire removal, reframe existing shots, and adjust background elements or lighting during post-production. —HypeBeast

As a writer, AI is a double-edged sword. Its ability as an editor, proofreader, and text analyzer can expedite and cost-control the post-draft process significantly. The concern I think most writers feel is the possibility that an LLM becomes sentient and can adopt genuine human characteristics that give writing its true individuality and style, the thing that separates prose from prattle. At this point, I have not seen a model capable of replicating that necessary touch of humanity.

Ben Affleck was a guest on the Joe Rogan Experience this year and spoke about the significance of AI as a tool of creators, as opposed to being the creator itself. His startup was aligned with that vision. While I think his InterPositive technology can be useful, I have little faith in it doing much more than expediting and cost-reducing more “content” for Netflix to churn out. The true ceiling it could have provided the film industry will most likely be inhibited by its new owners. 

The positive takeaway is that we will eventually reach a point with AI where anyone with the talent to make a high-quality feature length film will have the means to do so themselves, and with that comes the final gasp of the Hollywood gatekeepers’ relevance.