Morgan Housel

One thing that's interesting about those trends, if you look back with the glory of hindsight looking back, is that even the people who invented those technologies and were the most ambitious and had the most foresight in those could not have fathomed what their products turned into.

And so Henry Ford could not have ever imagined that he was gonna basically create the American suburb with the car.

He understood cars and motors and whatnot.

He couldn't fathom that this meant that people are gonna live 40 miles from where they work and commute in.

All these things that the Wright brothers could never have imagined Delta Airlines.

And then it's all these things that the people who have the greatest vision can't see where it's going.

If Steve Jobs was alive, I don't think he could have possibly foreseen what social media was gonna do to society on the phones that he built.

And so I think if that's the trend, even the people who have the most wild AI visions today

and who are creating the technologies themselves probably can't comprehend where it's going to go in 10 or 20 years.

The people who make Adobe Photoshop, which is like software for manipulating images, they create tools within Photoshop that they have no idea what people are going to do with it.

And they just understand that if you create every imaginable tool to manipulate an image, somebody will find a use for it, even if they don't know what that use is gonna be.

And I think there's a lot of that with technology, particularly with something like AI, where the people who are making these can't fathom what other people are gonna do with it.

They know what they would do with it.

But what is somebody else going to do with that technology?

That's where these things go way offhand.

What's very unique about AI historically, though, is that it's the first new technology that the people making it promise that if they're successful, they could destroy society.

That's a very unique thing that, hey, if we achieve what we're trying to achieve, we could wipe out 50% of white-collar jobs and hack every government database.

And they're explicitly warning about this on a daily basis.

That's a very unique thing.

Most of the time when you have a new technology, the people making it want to advertise the good that it's going to do versus constantly warning about how dangerous they are.