At the outset I want to say I’ve spent most of my life celebrating the new-fangled and innovative against the custodians of tradition who poked fun at anything resembling change.
For example, 18 years ago, I quit newspapers to help found New Mexico’s first online newspaper, the New Mexico Independent. A few years after that, I co-founded the state’s first digital nonprofit media outlet, New Mexico In Depth, in the aftermath of the 2008 economic collapse.
I like new things.
So, at the risk of acting like what my children think people my age act like — I am old enough to remember calling people on rotary phones and watching original episodes of “The Mod Squad” and “Room 222” — I am not sold that AI is the next big thing. Sure, it can help with mundane everyday tasks. But I’m not sure it’s a civilizational-defining technology, as many of its boosters repeatedly promise us.
That thought permeated my Monday morning routine as I read a New York Times story on the September vote by the Doña Ana County Commission to grant a massive tax break to developers of Project Jupiter, a collection of data centers that would cost $165 billion in Doña Ana County. (I have kept up with local reporting on the project, but when one of the globe’s largest media players publishes a story, it is noteworthy.)
I am not a technophobe. And I am certainly not a tech genius. But what I am is a journalist who has lived through a particular set of reportorial experiences that have left an impression on me.
Over the space of a few years in the 2000s, I reported on the economic carnage Enron’s bankruptcy wrought on Connecticut municipal budgets and the economic carnage to New Mexico’s investment portfolio by the near collapse of Wall Street in 2008, fueled by the systematic fraudulent valuation of toxic tranches of mortgage bonds.
Speculative booms powered by promises of a generational opportunity to invest in the future aren’t so terrible when they do what their boosters say they will: benefit the public at large. But when speculative booms go wrong, they can rain down devastation and catastrophe on tens of millions of unsuspecting Americans in the form of lost jobs, decimated retirement accounts and destroyed lives.
In the case of Enron, once the nation’s seventh-largest company and highly valued by Wall Street analysts, fraud ultimately undid the company. Enron’s senior officers copped to or were convicted of federal crimes related to conspiring “in wide-ranging schemes to fraudulently manipulate Enron’s publicly reported financial results,” all in service of keeping the company’s troubled finances a secret.
One of the victims of the fraud beyond the tens of thousands of Enron employees who lost their jobs was a quasi-public trash authority in Connecticut.
It had invested more than $200 million in state taxpayers’ money in Enron. Post collapse, Connecticut communities were left to figure out how to pay for the increased cost of hauling trash the authority imposed to make up for the loss of the $200 million. I lived and breathed that story for more than a year.
A few years later, I moved across the country to New Mexico to report on Gov. Bill Richardson and the Legislature just in time for the economic collapse of 2008.
During the lead up to the economic collapse, the occasional Cassandra predicting catastrophe was drowned out by a chorus of optimists who said the housing bubble driving the American economy wouldn’t burst because, well, it just wouldn’t.
After the housing bubble burst and almost took down the global economy with it, I spent many hours digging into court documents alleging pay-to-play allegations against officials in the Richardson administration. They had invested in opaque financial vehicles that lost much, if not all, of their value with Wall Street’s collapse, costing New Mexico taxpayers. I lived and breathed that story for much of 2009 into 2010.
Reporting on those stories has made me a skeptic whenever I hear someone declare an investment is a generational opportunity. That’s how the developers of Project Jupiter marketed the project to Doña Ana County officials.
I am not accusing anyone of fraud, or bad-faith dealing. I just know how bad things can go when they go sideways.
There are people much more tech savvy than I who see the possibility of AI becoming the next too-big-to-fail industry as AI weaves itself into Americans’ lives. If the AI bubble bursts, there is a chance that U.S. taxpayers might be asked to bail out the industry because it will become so important to 21st century life that a decision will be made that we cannot live without it.
Maybe it won’t turn out that way. Let’s hope.
In other words, I’m not a full-blown AI doomsday-er. But I am a skeptic.
I hope my skepticism is misplaced.
Trip Jennings started his career in Georgia at his hometown newspaper, The Augusta Chronicle, before working at newspapers in California, Florida and Connecticut. Since 2005, Trip has covered politics and state government for the Albuquerque Journal, The New Mexico Independent and the Santa Fe New Mexican. He holds a Master’s of Divinity from Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Ga. In 2012, he co-founded New Mexico In Depth.