Wasn’t this essentially just a huge money laundering operation?

It’s a way to move money around without actually doing anything.

The Kingdom’s other strategy—which, so far, seems to be much more successful than its urban development efforts—has been to make itself indispensable to the AI frenzy currently sweeping the globe.

When I started reading this article, I didn’t expect to be presented with yet another solid reason to want the entire field of AI to disappear forever.

Unfortunately, instead of a metaphor for renovation and adaptation, Neom is becoming a metaphor for the Kingdom’s failure to modernize—its inability to throw off the shackles of the past, and its delusion (which appears to be quickly dissipating) that it might somehow transform itself into a paragon of the future. At the same time, said floundering metaphor is being held aloft by thousands upon thousands of precarious workers, many of whom, according to a report from Human Rights Watch, have died for the project. There’s just something about a hubristic mega-project being built in the desert with the blood of countless laborers that doesn’t exactly speak of modernism.

I’ve never heard a single analyst, reporter, or YouTube video say they thought there was a chance of this mega project working. Using words like “ambitious”, “impossible”, “inconceivable”, etc are never a good sign but the Saudi response was like “Fuck em, SEND IT”