It's an old truism that in a gold rush, the only people who come out ahead are the people selling the picks and shovels. But that's not true - there's *even more money* to be made wholesaling picks and shovels to the retailers who operate the frontier mercantiles. Go meta!

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Alaskan_Gold_Mining_Supplies_(1897)_(ADVERT_277).jpeg

14/

The scam economy boasts a bewildering array of ancillary services, like a $150/month service that lets you produce fake screenshots showing vast monthly income on *other* scam services (November Kelly calls this "The world's most expensive 'inspect element'"):

https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture/posts/faux-high-level-163443872

13/

Take the world of online grifters, who don't just peddle get-rich-quick PDFs, they *also* peddle tools to generate get-rich-quick PDFs, as well as tools to steal other "wealth influencers'" insta videos and deepfake yourself into their pretend private jets:

https://www.404media.co/how-i-bought-a-private-jet-by-selling-10-subscriptions-to-404-media/

12/

Don't invest in a rideshare company, buy options to invest in a rideshare company:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/13/collapse-porn/#collapse-porn

The inverse relationship between doing something useful and making money is deeply ingrained in our economic wisdom.

11/

I think the only reason this question doesn't come up more frequently is that we're stewing in what Douglas Rushkoff calls the "go meta" economy, in which the most respectable and smartest business to operate must be as many abstraction layers away from real work as possible. Don't drive a taxi, own a medallion that you rent to the cab driver. Don't own a medallion, start a "rideshare" company. Don't start a rideshare company, invest in a rideshare company.

10/

If you were really on a glide path to creating an all-powerful deity and just needed cash to keep the venture going until the cancer-curing word-guesser awoke from its long slumber, then wouldn't you want *as much cash as possible*? Why would you voluntarily split the take with some sucky, washed, non-god-generating business from before 2022?

9/

If you've got a chatbot that can teach my kids, why sell it to my local school district? Why not just open a school?

If the chatbot can do the job, and if the chatbot costs less than the worker who does the job today, then the chatbot company can profitably sell services more cheaply than anyone who presently employs that worker, because the chatbot company *already owns the chatbot*.

8/

That's why they want your boss to fire you and replace you with their chatbots and split your wages with your former employer. But this just raises the same question: if you have a chatbot that can do a doctor's job, why sell it to a hospital? Why not just *open your own hospital?* If you've got a chatbot that can do a tax accountant's job, why sell it to a tax-prep service? Why not just open a tax-prep service?

7/

"General AI is around the corner and *it's* going to cure cancer. Cancer research is a waste of money!"

Which all raises the question: if you've truly incubated a foetal demiurge in your "AI lab," why are you offering to sell it to *me*? *What do the AI hucksters buy/One half so precious as the Gods they sell?*"

Of course, they might answer, "We need your money *now* so we can make god *later*."

6/

This is a question that needs to be forcefully put to AI hucksters. In their more expansive moments, the Altmans and Amodeis of the world will tell you that they're planning to teach the word-guessing program so many words that it will wake up and become god. DOGE's broccoli-haired brownshirts laughed in the faces of the NIH lifers who begged them not to vaporize their long-running cancer research projects.

5/