Pray, cast your eyes upon the scene at Wall Street, where the gentlemen of the Bourse have been seized by a most contagious panic! The house of Oracle, once thought an impregnable fortress of commerce, has suffered a fall so precipitous that it recalls the great Dot-com catastrophe of 1901—or rather, 2001, as the modern calendar insists. In a single week, their shares plummeted by nearly twenty per cent, leaving the shareholders in a state of agitation usually reserved for those who have discovered their pockets have been picked by a nimble-fingered street urchin.

For nine months, the speculators danced a merry jig, driving the company's valuation to a dizzying nine hundred billion dollars. But alas! The bubble burst with a sound like a thousand popping champagne corks, and the shares have since vanished by half. The cause, you ask? A most extravagant obsession with this 'Artificial Intelligence'—a phantom that promises much but, as of yet, demands a king's ransom in gold.

To fund this ghostly venture, the Oracle commercialists have behaved like gamblers at a midnight bazaar. They have accumulated debts of one hundred and thirty billion dollars! One can almost envision the board of directors, sweating profusely into their silk handkerchiefs, scribbling promissory notes and desperate bills of exchange to keep the creditors from the door. They intend to conjure another forty billion dollars through debt and the sale of shares, as if the bottomless pit of the treasury could be filled by simply printing more paper.

Moreover, a general dread has swept through the software guilds. The investors, fearing that these very 'intelligent' machines shall render their expensive products as obsolete as a horse-drawn carriage in the age of the locomotive, have begun to cast off their holdings with reckless haste.

Yet, mark the irony! The analysts—those professional dreamers who earn their crust by predicting the unpredictable—continue to urge the public to 'buy'! Indeed, some seventy-one per cent of these gentlemen claim the horizon is bright, even as the ship takes on water. One suspects they simply wish to find a few more brave souls to hold the bag.

As for the great Mr. Larry Ellison, that titan of industry, his fall from the peak of the wealth-list has been most comical. He has been overtaken by the lords of Google and Amazon, sliding down the social ladder like a clumsy butler on a waxed floor. Do not weep for him, however; the poor man is still burdened with over two hundred billion dollars—a sum so vast it would make a miser faint from sheer envy.