AI feels like a real mania, a genuine collective break from reality among the ruling class. They might as well be pouring billions of dollars into an attempt to replace all jobs and knowledge with a large bronze idol of Dagon.
They also just have too much money and no vision at all for what to do with it. For all the VC money poured into tech in the last 15 years the best they could come up with was "hopefully the self driving electric taxi becomes a thing" and "what if there was more shit you could gamble on?"
Clear to me we'd be much better served putting taxes back at great society levels and publicly funding the basic research it's too boring or unprofitable for these dolts to get interested in. They're in some green new deal while we at it.
Impossible is usually not the goal. It's usually just make what's incrementally better. Then somebody takes an incremental improvement from elsewhere and capitalizes on it. Moonshots don't actually achieve much in the long run, even if they're neat.