It’s bad enough the ultra-rich of Central Ohio made it far less affordable for many to live here. Now they are poised to implode the job market so to become even more wealthy – and potentially usher in the apocalypse.
This sounds insane. But don’t scoff, look who’s leading the insanity.
“Probably the largest [artificial intelligence] AI investment in the world will happen in Columbus,” said Les Wexner during an Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center board meeting last spring.
In the wake of this proclamation from Columbus’s scummiest of billionaires, local billionaire software tycoon and Ohio State alum Ratmir Timashev committed $200 million to recruit 100 AI start-ups to Central Ohio. He launched a start-up earlier this year to lead this recruitment called OH.io Ventures Inc. or “OH.io.”
“To make Ohio State, Columbus, and the Midwest the new high-tech mecca,” said Timashev, a Russian immigrant who came to America in 1992 to attend Ohio State, becoming a US citizen in 2024. Timashev, by the way, sits on the Columbus Partnership’s advisory council, the CEO-led coalition which shapes the region’s economic development.
Alex Husted, son of Ohio (MAGA) Senator Jon Husted is currently leading OH.io. This is also concerning considering the “tech bros” relocating to Columbus are of a far-right pro-Trump bent. Such as Anduril’s Palmer Luckey, who’s building autonomous killer drones at Rickenbacker.
Nonetheless, OH.io recently hit a crater of a pothole on its way to becoming Central Ohio’s next soulless corporate behemoth.
OH.io’s CEO Jeff Schumann and two other executives were fired by Timashev in April, and the trio followed with a lawsuit. Timashev, like many AI investors these days, probably came to the realization his ROI (Return On Investment) wasn’t so promising.
After he was fired, Schumann wrote a letter in the Dispatch stating he had left “substantial equity” to lead OH.io (boo-hoo). Timashev subsequently countersued alleging the trio “misappropriated” $8 million.
Also laughable is how Alex Husted was planning an entertainment and tech festival in Columbus for later this year promoting OH.io, but he postponed the event to 2027.
Experts have warned AI could replace hundreds of thousands of entry-level white-collar jobs, with overall unemployment reaching 20 percent. And in Columbus, self-driving forklifts and other warehouse robots could take away the few decent paying jobs with benefits available for those without a college degree.
Far worse predictions for AI are lurking. Geoffrey Hinton, the “Godfather of AI,” has publicly said there is a 10% to 20 percent chance AI could lead to human extinction within the next 30 years.
True, AI could revolutionize healthcare, by improving diagnostics, drug development and patient care. On the flipside, there’s “Flippy” the robotic arm which flips hamburgers. But even Flippy will be flippant towards the working class. Especially teenagers from marginalized neighborhoods who need a summer job.
Investors in AI are going to want to see a return. Corporations which have paid for AI will want to see greater revenue and profit. The bottom line has no moral clarity: if AI can replace your job, there will be no empathy, says Elon and other right-wing tech bros.
And if OH.io is successful, the prototypes will be tested in Columbus.
“I think it is no accident that Elon Musk is on the autistic spectrum,” says Chuck Lynd, a founding member of Columbus’s Simply Living, which promotes for a vibrant and self-staining local economy. “They honestly believe that AI can solve the climate crisis, cure cancer, improve warfare, solve income inequality with basic income. The tech bros are thoughtless about the likelihood of unemployment and loss of jobs to AI.”
If OH.io were to fail it would be the second Columbus AI effort to spectacularly flame out. In 2023, Columbus-based Olive AI abruptly shut down after those hospitals which bought the software slowly realized this healthcare-related AI may not even be true AI.
Olive AI promised its AI-powered software would dramatically cut administrative costs for healthcare providers. “Cutting administrative costs” is also known as taking away jobs and taking away more jobs.
“Worked at Olive from 2020-2022 as an engineering manager and the whole operation was built on smoke and mirrors,” stated one former employee in a Reddit post. “Even though they claimed it was AI, a lot of it was just OCR (Optical Character Recognition) screen scraping and Selenium doing work behind the scenes. Pay was fantastic and benefits were awesome, but we all knew it wouldn’t last.”
Olive AI was one of the first AI “Unicorns.” A privately held company which raises $1 billion from investors. In fact, venture capitalists saw Olive AI as the greatest of Unicorns. It was regarded as the healthcare IT company to receive the most venture capital funding ever.
“These guys think they can do whatever want,” says Lynd about Olive AI and the venture capitalists who backed them. “They are operating under the illusion that artificial intelligence is equivalent to what we do when we calculate in the brain, and that’s based on the idea we are separate from nature. It’s incredibly ignorant to bet on this because we don’t know what we are doing because we are part of nature and we’re just figuring AI out.”