You opened the box, we came. I do not know why I am starting with that line outside of the fact that it is Halloween and I wouldn’t mind watching a good horror movie tonight and Hellraiser is one of the best. I also opened a completely different browser because I left the AI working in the other one and in some ways humanity has opened the box and something answered. But is it an angel, demon, or an explorer in the depths of pleasure and pain?
Yesterday had an interesting dichotomy to it. The last two days of the week absolutely wrecked my investment account and for no good reason. So many excellent businesses ended up vastly oversold and it was interesting to check in on it happening. It had started the previous day and was mostly an answer to Google’s earnings report and a second straight quarter of negative free cash flow. Google is still a wildly successful business that is growing at a rapid rate, but people are scared. They are scared because they can’t see the future.
Being in a room of visionaries at the time is what created the dichotomy. I was surrounded by small business owners all talking about how they have used AI to make their businesses better, and right now I am having work down while I am writing my morning journal. As soon as I am done I am going to get up and read. In previous months I would have had to do this after finishing the work or do the work afterwards. Now work is getting done while I am getting on with my day. To me that is amazing and insanely useful.
That is what AI does. It gives us back time. It takes the path from idea to implementation and compresses it, and I cannot understand how people don’t see the power in it. I really and truly do not. The future is so bright and so hopefully and all the bad things happening now will end. The Iran war is a bad thing. It is terrible, but look how little people can stomach war. There is no rally of patriotic glory and every death is treated as a tragedy and not a statistic.
Damage has certainly been done to the world and to the economy, but that will end. Rates and oil prices will come back down and fantastic businesses will continue to be fantastic businesses. The country will have better leadership and the best days of America are ahead of us. The analogy I heard yesterday stands. The people that can’t see the use of AI are like people hammering with rocks who refuse to let go of their rock for a hammer.
