Everything is Gambling Now

You wake up and pick up your phone. You scroll social media. Bad post. Bad post. Boring post. Good post! Jackpot.

You get to work and sit down. Your boss is requiring everyone to find a way to use AI. The company tracks how many prompts you feed into the model. You prompt the model. It outputs garbage. You send the same prompt again. It outputs garbage. You send the same prompt a third time. This time it outputs something good enough to move on. You are commiserating with your co-worker and he tells you how he got this amazing result the other day. You ask how many prompts he had to try before he got it. "Uh, a few," he replies sheepishly.

After work, you turn on the game. Every commercial every ad break is for sports gambling. All the segments are sponsored by sports betting. The commentators talk about their parlays in the pre-game and half-time shows.

The news comes on. There's a story about how someone bet a bunch of cryptocurrency on the exact date that the USA bombed Iran and won big. It's something called a "prediction market." It's pretty clear to everyone that it must've been someone at the Pentagon or White House, but no one can prove it, and definitely no one knows how to prosecute it. Next up is the financial news. They talk about all of today's winners and losers, but no one is quite sure why any of the figures went up or down. They talk a lot about options, futures, and derivatives, which sound a lot like the parlays the sports guys were talking about, but it's somehow supposed to be different.

You catch yourself fantasizing about what your life would be like if you had the insider information to paid big on a prediction market. Or the stock market. Or whatever a "short squeeze" is. You think about what it would be like to win the lottery. It's the only way anyone can actually get ahead, you think. Or, of course, winning the birth lottery by having rich parents.

You pick up your phone to play your favorite mobile game. You do a gatcha pull. Common. You do a gatcha pull. Common. You drop $5 on more gems. You go a gatcha pull. Epic. You wonder if the game is rigged so that you always get something good after you spend real hard cash. Little do you know, it goes even deeper. The mobile game company has an in-depth profile of you. They can predict your mood accurately. They know your favorite characters. They know what shows you like, your age, where you live, and all of your other interests. They know exactly the moment to drip feed you enough dopamine to keep you playing forever.

Everything is gambling.