Niall Ferguson: The AI Boom Is a House of Cards

Fans of Dr. Seuss will know by heart the key stanzas of Green Eggs and Ham.

Do you like
green eggs and ham?

I do not like them,
Sam-I-Am.
I do not like
green eggs and ham.

For those who have never had to read a bedtime story, allow me to explain. An irrepressible little creature, Sam-I-Am, spends the entirety of the book pitching green eggs and ham—on the face of it, an unappetizing dish—to a skeptical and increasingly irascible larger creature. With every page, the pitch grows more elaborate. Would you like them on a boat? With a goat? In the rain? On a train? Surely, there must be some context in which green eggs would be appealing fare. By the time Sam prevails, his hapless victim inhabits a scene of chaos.

When you come to think of it, there is often someone called Sam trying to sell you something you don’t initially want. In the 1920s, as I learned from Andrew Ross Sorkin’s 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History—and How It Shattered a Nation, it was Sam Crowther’s article, “Everybody Ought to Be Rich”—exhorting housewives to buy stocks with margin credit. A few years ago, it was Sam Bankman-Fried with his crypto exchange, FTX. At the height of his fame, Bankman-Fried declared, “I want FTX to be a place where you can do anything you want with your next dollar. You can buy bitcoin. . . . You can buy a banana.” And you could also have bought green eggs and ham—until FTX blew up and Sam landed in prison.