GREED HAS long been a catalyst for capitalist innovation. In the California gold rush prospectors developed water cannons to blast hills away in search of the ore. In the American mortgage boom of the early 2000s, banks built madcap loan-securitisation machines to keep the credit bender rolling. For a while, both were seen as ingenious forms of engineering—one to harness extra energy, the other to slather the housing market with cheap loans. Today energy and credit are two of the biggest constraints on the artificial-intelligence (AI) bonanza. Once again, the creative juices are flowing.
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