Google co-founder Sergey Brin warns of AI and name-drops Ethereum

When Sergey Brin talks, people listen. And right now Brin is talking about AI and cryptocurrency. 

As the president of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, Brin is uniquely positioned to not only see what technological developments are coming down the pike but to influence them as well. That makes the company’s annual founders’ letter an important indicator for the tech world. According to Brin, who wrote this year’s, the signs are mixed. 

He opens the letter by quoting from Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, and proceeds from there to dive into the huge growth in computing power that he’s witnessed during his tenure at Google and Alphabet. 

“There are several factors at play in this boom of computing,” he writes. “First, of course, is the steady hum of Moore’s Law, although some of the traditional measures such as transistor counts, density, and clock frequencies have slowed. The second factor is greater demand, stemming from advanced graphics in gaming and, surprisingly,…