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Sam Bankman-Fried resides in a prison somewhere today. Sam Altman bounced between two tech giants over a week recently before settling back in with his original company. All because of a misunderstanding.

These two men’s faces have come to symbolize the revolution taking place in our lives as we continue to evolve as a species: Cryptocurrency and Artificial Intelligence.

Samuel Benjamin Bankman-Fried, or SBF, is an American entrepreneur who was convicted of fraud and related crimes in November 2023. Bankman-Fried founded the FTX cryptocurrency exchange and was celebrated as “a kind of poster boy for crypto”.  What is crypto?

A cryptocurrency is a digital currency, which is an alternative form of payment created using encryption algorithms. The use of encryption technologies means that cryptocurrencies function both as a currency and as a virtual accounting system. To use cryptocurrencies, you need a cryptocurrency wallet. But, there is not an open hole in the ground somewhere in Arizona mining bitcoin, because it is artificial. Emptying your pockets of change, there will be no bitcoin falling out. What you need to use it is an exchange, much like when traveling to another country, you exchange dollars for francs, marcs, or pounds.  When you return, you go to an exchange to transform that foreign currency back into dollars.

And that’s where Bankman-Fried went wrong. Lost in his inner circle of “effective altruists,” he was too busy trying to change the world and lost track of what was happening in FTX.  If you take your chits to the window in Las Vegas, there had better be some dollars back there to cash them in. With FTX, there were not enough dollars to exchange for crypto, and thus poor Sam was convicted of defrauding his customers and is in jail for it.

Sam Altman was fired from Open AI because of a rift with the Board over what it thought was Altman’s too-rapid development of AI technology, then hired by Microsoft because of his artificial intelligence engineering skills. Within a week, he was back at OpenAI.

Altman’s conflict developed because he was critical of the Board’s focus upon moving carefully in the unknown territory of artificial intelligence. You know, this is where the robots and machines take over the world from humans.

The key word in artificial intelligence is “artificial.” Look it up, and the word is defined as “made or produced by human beings, rather than occurring naturally, especially as a copy of something natural.” In other words, a substitute, not genuine.

How do you feel about AI? Scared, or confident? Excited, or threatened?

It’s not like we haven’t been warned about these changes affecting all of us.  Alvin Toffler described what the rapid changes in technology would do to humans in a “Super-Industrial Age” he envisioned in his 1970’s book Future Shock. Mathematician and inventor Ray Kurzweil, responsible for speech recognition technology and electronic keyboards, has talked about the likely course of AI development of humans and machines since the 1990s in such books as The Age of Spiritual Machines and The Singularity is Near.

Heck, in 1802, even William Wordsworth wrote:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—

Little we see in Nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

People smarter than me will have to figure out the complicated environment of cryptocurrency, or what I call “false money.” Read Michael Lewis’s book Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon to understand more about Bankman-Fried and the crypto world.

I, for one, do not believe a machine will ever replace our human relationships, such as a walk on the beach with sand between our toes, the kiss of a beautiful woman, or the family gathered around the table during the Holidays.  We live with each other in a non-perfect world surrounded by memories of lives lived in a mix of people, living and loving and laughing, and that’s the way it oughta be. 

Award-winning editorialist Alan Clark writes for newspapers all across Middle Tennessee. His book “Setting Fire to this Life” available on Amazon.com, is set in a future full of predictions that have already come to pass.