Indus­tri­al and petro giants ignor­ing glob­al warm­ing in the name of prof­it, AI devel­op­ers rat­ing speed over con­se­quences and more than a few  bil­lion­aires, have one thing in com­mon: none of them seem acquaint­ed with the Scrip­tures, or The Who  and think we aren’t either.

The scrip­tur­al les­son is Matthew 7:16, “By their deeds you will know them…”,
For the sec­u­lar of us, The Who summed that up neat­ly (if inad­ver­tent­ly) in a line they wrote in 1971 :“We don’t get fooled again.”
A cou­ple of decades lat­er, it was made clear to bat­tery man­u­fac­tur­ers that  recy­cling their prod­ucts caused lead poisoning.
But, as a New York Times inves­ti­ga­tion found: “When the world’s largest car com­pa­nies wrote their envi­ron­men­tal poli­cies, they exclud­ed lead.”
It would have made for more expen­sive sup­ply chains, and per­ish the thought that com­mon good should cut into prof­it mar­gins. After all, the esti­mat­ed 1.5 mil­lion peo­ple who die from lead poi­son­ing every year, are main­ly in devel­op­ing countries.
Accord­ing to the non-prof­it think tank Influ­enceMap, the five “super­ma­jor” oil com­pa­nies (BP, Shell, Chevron, Exxon­Mo­bil, and Total­En­er­gies) alone, spend hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars a year to por­tray them­selves as “pos­i­tive and proac­tive on cli­mate change”.
Mean­while, pres­sure from petro states, led by Sau­di Ara­bia and the efforts of some 1600 lob­by­ists for the fos­sil fuel sec­tor, ensured that the just con­clud­ed COP30 cli­mate con­fer­ence failed to pro­duce a roadmap to stop glob­al warming.
Mabe it would help if the invi­ta­tions to the next COP include a quote from the psy­chi­a­trist Carl Jung:  “It is only our deeds that reveal who we are.”

                     INSULTING INTELLIGENCE

The tech com­pa­ny CEOs hell-bent on win­ning the AI devel­op­ment race reas­sure us they are care­ful, con­sci­en­tious and  con­cerned about where their inven­tions, devel­op­ments and ideas will lead.
They’d also like us to  over­look such minor incon­ve­niences as the fact that their need and demand for elec­tri­cal power is grow­ing “more than four times faster than all oth­er sec­tors com­bined.    Whether that’s a price we have to pay for the undoubt­ed effi­cien­cies AI brings, is debatable.
But cer­tain­ly not in the cause of the bal­ance sheets and share prices of com­pa­nies that are heed­less­ly insert­ing AI into things like inter­ac­tive toys that “ will talk in-depth about sex­u­al­ly explic­it top­ics, will offer advice on where a child can find match­es or knives,”
A  $99 ted­dy bear (with­drawn after com­plaints) used an AI insert to hold “friend­ly chats and deep con­ver­sa­tions to stim­u­late curios­i­ty and learning.”
Not only is that doing the job of par­ents, some AI won­der toys  “can also record a child’s voice and col­lect oth­er sen­si­tive data, by things like facial recog­ni­tion scans.”

                        DUPING THEMSELVES

On a more friv­o­lous, or per­haps poet­ic jus­tice lev­el, the bil­lion­aires who prof­it from all of the above, flaunt their wealth to show how clever they are, and  shame­less­ly  por­tray them­selves as genius­es whose lifestyles we should envy, if not worship.
Some­one needs to tell them that the Bea­t­les’  “Can’t Buy Me Love”,  also applies to taste and com­mon sense.
In a fine exam­ple of under­state­ment, the New York Times report­ed that at a recent week-long  Sotheby’s auc­tion, “paint­ings and sculp­tures sold for sums that might sur­prise you.” The sto­ry  was set out as a quiz,  head­lined: “Are You Smarter than a Billionaire?”
I admit I fall into the “I may not know much about art but I know…” cat­e­go­ry, but I feel com­fort­able in pre­sum­ing the “you” who might be sur­prised at the sums, refers to peo­ple who have more com­mon sense than money.
Among the items pur­chased by those whose men­tal and fis­cal assets are the antithe­sis of that:
A bronze sculp­ture that looks like an inflat­able toy went for $4,442,000.
A cow­boy, based on a toy man­nequin, was snapped up for a mere $3,369.000.
One shud­ders to think what sort of child­hood the buy­ers had.
In a clear case of “nev­er mind the con­tents, feel the pack­age “, some­one lashed out $203,200 for a hand­made bot­tle of gin.
A cre­ation the Times review­er gushed over as a  “shim­mer­ing wall hang­ing” went for  $1,524,000.
It was made with beer bot­tle caps.
And if that isn’t proof enough that you can sell any­thing if you stick a price tag on it only bil­lion­aires can afford, Mau­r­izio Catel­lan, the “con­cep­tu­al artist” who man­aged to con­vince a cryp­to entre­pre­neur that a banana duct taped to a wall and labelled “Come­di­an” was worth $6.2‑million, saw his sol­id gold toi­let, titled “Amer­i­ca”  (make of that what you will), sold for $12,110,000.
But at least it went to a place that spe­cialis­es in  the bizarre and ridicu­lous — Ripley’s Believe It or Not!
It sounds like the kind of place where the bil­lion­aires would feel right at home.

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