Headed north on the two-lane road, John Reiff looked out at the open desert along Highway 40. The flat, barren view seemed to go on forever, extending for miles until reaching distant and shadowy mountains across long patches of beautiful, timeless desert. A view he might expect to find on a postcard. If they still existed.
An old red sedan passed them, covered in a film of dust with a back seat filled with items he could not make out.
He continued studying the vehicle as it gradually pulled away from them. “Haven’t seen many new cars on the road.”
“There aren’t any,” replied Yamada from the back seat behind Waterman, prompting Reiff to glance over his shoulder.
“What do you mean?”
The younger man corrected himself. “Sorry, I should say ‘not many.’”
“Why is that?”
“When the collapse happened, everything basically stopped. Production of virtually everything ground to a halt. From cars to houses to baby strollers. So did most shipping and technology. Which is only now beginning to come back.”
“Technology?”
“Tech got hit especially hard,” he answered. “Not just computers and phones, everything. Sooner or later, somewhere down the line, technology was at the core of pretty much every industry. Whether in the design, its manufacturing, shipping, personnel. Everything relied on technology. Which made it one of the biggest bubbles of all.”
Reiff turned in his seat and gave Yamada his full attention.
“What people didn’t realize,” he continued, “or think about, was where all that printed money had gone. What people didn’t understand was that government-printed money goes everywhere: stocks, bonds, housing, energy, food, and especially technology. Not only did it flow into giant corporations, but it ended up in their research and development departments. Driving huge advancements for decades. Bigger and bigger hard drives. Faster and faster computer chips. Better memory cards. More advanced phones that could do almost anything. Better cameras, better video screens. And in turn, all those advancements flowed into anything that used a CPU or a computer interface.”
“How do you know all this?” asked Reiff.
“My dad told me. He was a computer engineer. In the heyday of it all. What he called our gluttonous peak.” Yamada grinned. “He said people used to actually line up around city blocks just to buy a new phone on the day it came out. Or to see a new movie. Can you imagine that?”
Reiff looked at Waterman, who raised his eyebrows sarcastically. “As a matter of fact.”
“You wouldn’t see that these days. My phone,” said Yamada, “is twelve years old.”
“Really?”
“It’s not uncommon,” said Rachel, sitting behind him.
“We fix things now instead of just buying a new one. Because a lot of new things either don’t exist or they’re too expensive—except for the rich.”
“The haves,” remarked Waterman, “and the have-nots. The collapse turned an awful lot of the former into the latter. In some cases, almost overnight. A lot of people deserved it. But a lot of people didn’t.”
“So, when all that money vaporized,” said Yamada, “it left behind a huge vacuum in its place. My dad called it a ‘retrenchment.’ In pretty much everything, including things like research and development. He said we became way too dependent on things we didn’t understand. Things like artificial intelligence.”
“AI?”
Yamada nodded. “My dad hated it. He said AI was where we really lost control. Not just having computers do things, but decide things, without us even being able to see or understand how that decision was made. Things were too good to be true for a long time. Almost magical. Until it all came crashing down.”
“Literally,” said Waterman.
“Yeah. By the time the collapse happened,” said Yamada, “AI was part of everything. Self-driving cars, autopilots on planes, phones, watches, even financial markets. It was huge in the financial markets. Computers trading with each other instead of with people. Using computerized models that not only created giant financial bubbles, but allowed them to grow to impossible sizes.”
Rachel leaned forward. “A lot of people like to say we screwed ourselves, but AI was the piledriver.”
“Wow.”
“I was too young to really understand it when it happened. But my dad did. And he said we had it coming.”
Reiff turned to look at him again.
“He said it was engineering hubris run amok.”
Waterman glanced over from the driver’s seat. “Not the most uplifting topic of conversation.”
“Did anything survive?”
“Yeah,” he answered, “but with a hell of a lot of pain.”