An Unrestrained Demon

I wasn’t around in the late 1800s.

But I have to imagine people were having a lot of the same conversations we’re having today about artificial intelligence.

Look at this cartoon from 1889. It’s called “An Unrestrained Demon”:

Electricity was spreading across America. Wires were going up everywhere.

People were scared, and to be fair, some of them had good reasons to be. The early electrical systems were dangerous.

But imagine telling those people what electricity would eventually make possible.

Not just light bulbs. Think about everything else.

Electricity didn’t just give people light. It helped create entire industries that didn’t exist before.

Factories could operate differently. New businesses opened. New jobs were created.

And, suddenly, people could invent things that would have been impossible just a few years earlier.

Think about a housewife living in the middle of nowhere who had never had electricity in her home.

Now she could have lights, a refrigerator, a washing machine, and eventually a radio that connected her to the rest of the world.

Imagine what that did for her life. Imagine how much time she got back and what she could do with it.

And here’s my favorite part. Most of those inventions hadn’t even been imagined when people were first arguing about electrical wires.

They weren’t just wrong about what electricity would do.

That’s how I think about artificial intelligence.

Everybody wants to argue about what AI is going to do tomorrow.

Which jobs will disappear? Which companies will lose? What happens to the people who get left behind?

Those are fair questions.

But what about the jobs that don’t exist yet? What about the industries nobody has invented?

What about the opportunities we can’t even imagine today?

People are so busy worrying about the next step that they’re not thinking three or four steps ahead.

I don’t know what those new industries will be. Nobody does. That’s the whole point.

And I’m not suggesting we ignore the risks. Electricity had real dangers, too. We had to figure out how to make it safer as we went along.

But imagine if we had decided that electricity was too dangerous and stopped developing it.

Think about everything we would have missed.

As investors, traders, and Americans, I think it’s important to remember what happened back then.

Not because history is going to repeat itself exactly, but because human nature hasn’t changed all that much.

We tend to fear what we don’t understand, especially when we can’t imagine what comes next.

I’d rather keep an open mind about what might be possible.

That doesn’t mean we need to buy every stock related to AI.

It means sticking to our strategies, and finding opportunities with well-defined risk and exponentially greater potential reward.

It also means learning to use these new tools to make that process better and more efficient. I’m already seeing the benefits every single day.

But a lot of people aren’t.

They’re too focused on what might go wrong tomorrow to see what could be possible in the years ahead.