History Rhymes

     I've been reading The Big Con, David W. Maurer's entertaining 1940 study of confidence men and confidence games.  All of the high-money cons, a thousand dollars and up (way, way up, even then) require a mark who's willing to get involved with what's presented as crooked deal -- a stock-market scam, a "fixed" athletic contest, illicitly-obtained inside or advance information on outcomes, and so on.  The genuinely honest won't be drawn in.

     Oh, it's cleverly presented, usually in a "cheating the cheaters" framework.  You don't have to be more than a little larcenous to be pulled in; but it's always a something-for-nothing deal, an opportunity for profit apparently far out of proportion with the necessary investment.

     A lot of con men started out in Indiana.  It even shows up in nicknames, like the Indiana Wonder and the Hoosier Kid.  An insideman for the Wonder mused, "At one time, you could go to almost any [Indiana] County Fair and some farmer would take you aside and show you some new kind of flat-joint [slang for a crooked gambling device] that he had invented."

     This springs to mind when the local TV news reports yet another heated city or county meeting over yet another data center being planned or built.  We've already got a lot of them here, thanks to cheap land and affordable power, and the AI boom is pushing the demand for more.  There's a lot less "there" there in AI than meets the eye* and I suspect a lot of the boom is a bubble.  When it pops, local governments that have made tax concessions, helped secure loans and spent on infrastructure may be left holding the bag -- or "the poke," a short-con in which what the mark thought was a securely-wrapped bundle of money in big bills he'd put a much smaller security deposit on turns out to be a stack of carefully-trimmed newsprint.

     It'll be a whole new kind of Indiana Wonder.
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* AI counts, in part, on "pathetic fallacy," the same thing that underpins animism or a child's play with plush toys, dolls or toy soldiers, imbuing an inanimate object with emotion and genuine agency.  We're strongly wired to do it -- but that doesn't mean there's really a ghost in even the most clever of our machines.  Confidence games also rely on our will to believe, our desire to play along, our need for wonder.  This is not a coincidence.