You and I might have very different perspectives on risk.

I'm going to confess that I rarely watch live TV with its related advertising. It's even more uncommon that I'll be watching live sports. So while I'm aware of the proliferation of gambling apps, it wasn't until the World Cup that I fully grasped the normalization and ubiquity of betting on everything. Pop over to the local sports bar and 2/3 of the men are on their phones talking gambling lingo.

Disclosure: I've never been a gambler. I don't get the rush of adrenaline that others get from a slot machine or a scratch-off lottery ticket or how many shots on goal Messi will have. I know that the odds are not in my favor, and that the house always wins.

But this normalization of gambling — having a bookie app in your pocket and Timothée "I want to be the serious actor of my generation" Chalamet hawking gambling apps on TV — flattens the sense of risk.

​Americans now spend more on gambling than they do on movies, arts, music, and museums combined. This has to mess with our perspective.

This leads to people (mostly men) believing that they can outsmart the house. A couple of wins and they think they're the smartest guys in the room. They believe that they know and can exploit the loopholes in the systems. They feel invincible.

Ok, you say. What's the point?

The point is that I see parallels between this and the tech mindset.

This week, there was a lot said about OpenAI's hack of Hugging Face. There was a lot of shock about the fact that the model broke containment, found loopholes, and went out to pillage a competitor in order to complete its task. I think this is the most obvious outcome of a system working as intended.

I spent most of my adult life living and working in Silicon Valley. The entire place is founded on loophole-seekers who believe themselves to be the smartest person in the room. Now we're supposed to be surprised that they have built systems that actively look for loopholes to exploit?

AI working outside weak guardrails is just an amplification of the techbro mindset. It’s a system designed in a way that reflects the inputs of people who want shortcuts, quick dopamine hits, and utterly disregard common sense when it comes to risk. Because only the smartest guys (and systems) in the room are clever enough to exploit the systems. AI reflects the principles of those who built it.

Which brings me back to the normalization and flattening of risk. This distortion of risk perception exists in our digital lives. How different is personal financial ruin from planetary destruction in terms of risk concept? Everyone thinks it can't happen to them, that they're the smart ones, that they can find the loopholes to exploit.

In the end, it's all just gambling.

Speaking of risk, I am shocked by how few people are talking about the risks of "circular AI" and the related company valuations. There is so much vapor money going back and forth to boost valuations, but none of it is resulting in profit: company A invests capital into company B in exchange for company B buying its products or services. (Sometimes, if they're feeling fancy, it's a 3-way shell game and not just a direct exchange.) It's extremely reminiscent of The Big Short. And we're propping our economy up on it.

How risky is your gas stove? It can have significant health impacts. Switching from gas to electric has significant health benefits. “Our improvement was about twice as much as you typically see with medical treatment of asthma,” said the lead study investigator.

​Zero-water data centers aren't actually using zero water. Even data centers relying on energy-intensive dry-cooled methods need a backup. "So what happens when the outside air is too hot or too humid for dry cooled operations? The facility doesn’t shut down and wait it out. They switch to their backup system, which relies on evaporative cooling."

​Who's financing the AI buildout? Private equity investments are keeping the costs off the big tech balance sheets. "The bonds behind these campuses are increasingly held by pension funds and life insurers who seek long-duration yield. New York and Pennsylvania public pensions are invested in the same infrastructure fund behind Meta’s Louisiana project as well as several of Oracle’s data centers and other AI-related infrastructure. Wall Street has begun bundling this debt into securities. The exposure, in other words, is being distributed into long-horizon, fiduciary pools of capital — exactly the type of vehicles that the sustainable-finance community spends its days trying to steward."

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Alisa Bonsignore

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