Jon McNeill

The most frequent example I hear is, hey, in the 1950s, there were skyscrapers full of humans who were humanly calculating spreadsheets.

And then the real spreadsheet came along and all those jobs are eliminated.

And then that's where the story ends for them.

And I'm like, hey, time out.

I was just in New York City.

Those skyscrapers aren't empty.

What happened?

And what happened was a plethora of things.

And I would use just one tiny little example of what happened that created trillions and trillions of dollars of market cap.

Once a spreadsheet was available that was digital, it could calc things in complexity way faster than those humans and those skyscrapers.

And so all of a sudden, you could have sophisticated pricing engines like Black Scholes at your fingertips.

And that meant that you could now price options and futures and derivatives that didn't exist before.

And so entire markets got created on top of that one technological change that employ hundreds of thousands of people.

And again, that was unknowable before.

on the other side when this spreadsheet was just being invented, that somebody would deploy Black-Scholes and somebody would figure out how to price puts and calls and derivatives and make entire markets like the options exchange, the Merck, et cetera, possible to be able to syndicate loans.

Like none of that stuff was available and now it's all available.

And that's the kind of thing where I think, okay, make me the case that

All of a sudden, now the computers do all of that and take all that creativity and all those jobs.

I just haven't seen that in history, and I don't know that I can fully buy into that ending point.

I sort of wonder if they're creating a app layer or a tooling layer.