Otto Von Bismarck is famous for saying: "People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war, or before an election". Hunting season is upon us, we're in the midst of war with Iran, and the midterm elections are less than two weeks away. As Fleetwood Mac used to sing: Tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies. I don't know who to believe anymore.
To get away from all the noise I've spent the past two months immersed in finance and technology books. Books about boom and bust cycles of yesteryear are a focal point since there's great debate about the current technology revolution as to how much further we have to go. 1929 by Andrew Ross Sorkin is excellent as well as 1873 by Liaqat Ahamed. Most people are familiar with the crash of 1929 and the ensuing Great Depression. The global financial meltdown of 1873, not so much. But just like the Dot Com implosion of 1999-2000 and the Great Recession of 2007-2008, it was the big banks and Wall Street that caused the financial meltdowns by too much speculation, margin trading and greed.
As an offshoot of my reading, I've been creating a watchlist of equities that I would like to purchase if they get down to my price range. They're primarily Artificial Intelligence stocks, but everything is AI now, at least with Corporate America. Artificial Intelligence permeates the national news. It's coming to take all of our jobs or is coming to wipe out humanity if you believe the hype. The question remains, what type of future do you believe in? The James Cameron version (he wrote and directed The Terminator), or the Gene Roddenberry interpretation (Roddenberry created Star Trek). I tend to be an optimist, so I'm going with Starfleet Command.
It seems as if the more I read, the less I know. This is especially true with technology. It's evolving at warp speed and it's tough to keep up. As a society, we are captives of the Digerati. One thing that has confused me but was clarified recently is the concept of tokenization, a term that is frequently bandied about. The problem that I had with technology pundits is that they don't specify which tokenization that they're referring to. There's tokenization in AI, and there is tokenization in cryptocurrency. It's like saying Portland but not specifying if it's in Oregon or Maine. Two different cities and two different technology concepts with very little overlap.
Tokenization in AI deals with Large Language Models, how text strings are diced up and put back together like jigsaw puzzles to ensure the most efficient outcome of your prompt. The large chatbots such as Anthropic's Claude, or OpenAI's ChatGPT get charged by token usage. With crypto, tokenization is the digitization of analog assets such as equities, bonds, real estate contracts in order to flow through the blockchain. I'm a big believer in crypto tokenization and that it's the next phase of the plumbing that makes our financial systems operate in a timely manner. In a 24/7 marketplace, blockchain and tokenization is not only the future, but it's the present. It's going mainstream and I've bet on it with investments in Solana and Chainlink.
Two other concepts that were defined in my most recent readings are subsets of Artificial Intelligence: Agentic AI and Artificial General Intelligence. They sound about the same but they aren't. Agentic AI is here and it's growing, and it's putting people out of work. What used to take hours to accomplish manually, takes a matter of seconds. It is and will put white collar workers on the unemployment line. The blacksmiths and wainwrights in the horse and buggy era had to learn to pump gas and fix carburetors with the introduction of the automobile. This is a similar transition.
When you do a prompt in pedestrian AI, it's reactive. It searches for something based on your query, a set of instructions if you will. With Agentic AI, it's proactive. You state a task and it will reason and plan from inputs of multiple data sources, not just a Large Language Model. This is in real time. For instance, if you want to book a flight, you will prompt the day, price range, and destination. The Agentic AI agent will scour all available data sources available and book your flight. Letting an AI Agent have your credit card number is a dangerous proposition in my opinion. Not enough guardrails in a nascent technology so buyer beware.
Artificial General Intelligence is a technology for the future. To quote Google, "a hypothetical form of AI that matches or surpasses human capabilities across all cognitive tasks.". Ray Kurzweil has been writing for years about "The Singularity", where machines become humanlike. Sentient Computing is the technical term, where computers have subjective experiences, self-awareness and personal feelings. In The Terminator, a search and destroy cyborg, the T-800 from Cyberdyne Systems, time travels to Earth to complete an assassination. Not only is this the concept of Artificial General Intelligence, but the negative aspects of it, too.
Elon Musk has transformed Tesla into a robotics company and this is what he envisions in the not too distant future, a company that produces human-like robots. Musk has already manufactured a flying car in the Tesla Roadster, right out of the 1960's era cartoon The Jetsons, or a more modern example is 1997's movie The Fifth Element. He's a brilliant engineer, but overshoots his projections which makes both his companies Tesla and SpaceX extremely expensive to invest in on a valuation basis. They're cult stocks. Musk is a cult figure. They go well together. There's speculation that he's going to merge the two companies which would be a runway to creating Skynet if you're familiar with The Terminator franchise. He'd have the androids and the neural networks. It's a dangerous combination if handled incorrectly.
You can be a Luddite and do all the protesting you want to do, but you're not going to change anything. You can't fight the future, the future always wins. To use a cliché, you can't put the genie back in the bottle. We're in a race with China for AI dominance and if I'm going to get killed by a rogue cyborg, I'd rather it be American made than manufactured in China.
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