Forests have been sacrificed for their paper and Arabian kingdoms deflated for their oil to provide scribes and pundits with the materials and energy necessary to propagate predictions. This is wrong on many levels, but to name two: news was better when it consisted of reporting what happened, rather than spinning predictions of what might happen; and secondly, nobody ever predicts what’s not going to happen. Fake news not only fails to tell us what is happening, it never tells us what is not going to happen. Let us begin to correct that situation here and now.

Five Things That Ain’t Never Gonna Happen:



1. There is never going to be a driverless car.

There’s no such thing now, anywhere in the world — all the driverless cars have drivers. In all the tests you’ve read about of “self-driving cars,” the cars were not, in fact, driving themselves but were under close, intense human supervision. The hype was not about what had been achieved, but what might be achieved sometime maybe, and was aimed at investors and lenders. Uber didn’t create a self-driving car division because autonomous care were ready to go, but because it was the quickest way to raise a few billion dollars, and Uber is burning cash at the rate now of about a billion dollars a quarter.

2. There is never going to be a “new industrial revolution” based on 5G cellular networks.

There is a very simple and self-evident reason for this assertion: 5G networks require transmitters (cellular towers) to be spaced about every thousand feet. The cell phone business is desperate to come up with a reason to keep you and me buying new and improved cell phones every two years, but they aren’t and they can’t. Hence the Hail-Mary hype about clunky, 5G-capable phones (with battery life measured in minutes) even though there are in this world only a few blocks of 5G networks working sporadically.

3. America is never going to be energy independent.

We burn twice as much energy as we find — energy companies like to say they “produce” it, but what they do is find it — we have for about a half century and we will until the end. All the easy oil and coal and gas has been burned, and what remains is ever more difficult and expensive to extract. It takes more energy every year to get energy out of the ground, and there is simply no way it is going to stop getting worse.

4. Robots are never going to replace humans in the workplace.

Robots can and do perform individual tasks — making welds on cars on the assembly line, for instance, but humans are not often hired to do single, simple tasks. When they tried to put a robot in a fast food restaurant they found it could, indeed, flip the burgers. But humans had to prepare the raw burgers, put them in in place, take the cooked burgers away, assemble and serve the meals, and deal with the robot when it broke or went crazy.

5. Artificial intelligence is never going to be anything other than artificial.

YouTube used artificial intelligence in a bot designed to flag and counter fake news. No more unreliable, biased human interpretations, this was going to finally meet Sergeant Joe Friday’s goal — “Just the facts, ma’am.” It hadn’t been deployed long when it flagged video of Notre Dame Cathedral burning and relabeled it as the Twin Towers burning on 9/11. Repeat after me: artificial intelligence is artificial.

All these glittering dreams — of life going on as it has, only better — are part of a vicious con being executed on all of us by the world’s industrial oligarchs, who just want to keep making more money. They have learned that if their business plan includes words like driverless cars, artificial intelligence or genetic engineering, they can sell stock and borrow money without having a product, without making any profits and with neither collateral nor demonstrated ability to pay it back.

The whole world has turned into a giant Ponzi Scheme, which requires new suckers to be bedazzled out of their money faster than the old suckers go broke or drop out. Ponzi schemes always fail, of course, but in the meantime laissez les bons temps rouler.