Fatal dog attacks in the US

As global venture capitalists have poured increasingly absurd sums into artificial intelligence, American dogs have been fatally attacking more Americans, which sounds either like a conspiracy or like one of those late-night philosophical observations that seems profound until you've had coffee. The correlation is 0.957 from 2015 to 2023, nine data points of dogs and data centers refusing to explain themselves. The dogs have not confirmed their involvement.

Private AI investment globally rose from roughly $12 billion in 2015 to somewhere north of $90 billion by 2023, accelerated dramatically by the ChatGPT moment and the arms race that followed. Fatal dog attacks in the US, meanwhile, climbed from around 34 per year to nearly 100 — driven largely by a pandemic-era boom in dog ownership, shifts in popular breed preferences, and a broader rise in multi-dog households. One trend is the private capital system finding its current obsession; the other is the American dog population getting larger and, in aggregate, slightly less supervised. They share nothing but the years.

A correlation this clean across nine years is what happens when two entirely separate forces ride the same economic tide. The dogs do not know what an AI investment round is. That is probably for the best.