Faust, AI, and the Grand Bargain We’ve Already Made

Capture.

I led my predictions for 2025 with the dog-bites-man observation that technology has eclipsed finance as the most powerful industry in the world. More than six months into the year, I’d like to emend my conclusion. Tech hasn’t eclipsed finance. It has captured it.

Finance has always leveraged technology — at Wired in the early 1990s, we were fond of saying that technology’s twin engines of innovation were money and sex — but the most interesting story was always money. Care to understand the future of internet infrastructure? Bone up on how hedge funds optimize network latency. Want to peer into the future of online consumer services back when the Web was a glint in Marc Andreessen’s eye? Start with online banking.

But in the past few years, the bit has flipped. Technology is no longer a mere enabler of finance. Thanks in large part to society’s rapturous embrace of AI, technology has absorbed the finance industry, adopting its amorality and its rapacious appetite for risk. Capital has become tech’s hand maiden, financing an endless stream of audacious bets: Half a trillion for AI server farms? Let’s do it twice! A $2 billion seed round for a company with no product? Probably undervalued! Abandoning your values to access autocratic blood money? Everyone else is doing it, why not us!?