Artificial Intelligence: A perspective for the long-term investor

Few topics dominate today's market discussions like artificial intelligence. Much of the conversation has focused on worst-case scenarios. Geoffrey Hinton, the Turing Award-winning pioneer of deep learning, famously left Google to warn about the technology he helped create. Along with other prominent researchers and commentators, he has argued that AI could surpass human capabilities, eliminate millions of white-collar jobs, concentrate wealth among a small number of people and companies, and ultimately force governments to adopt measures such as Universal Basic Income.

Those are serious concerns, but they also raise the question every long-term investor should ask: Is this a genuine break from the historical relationship between innovation and economic growth, or rather the next great chapter in that history? I argue for the latter: “this time is different” remains the four most dangerous words in investing!

The anxiety around new technology taking our livelihoods isn't a modern phenomenon — it's practically an economic tradition. Every major leap forward destroys specific, existing roles, causing real short-term pain for the people holding those jobs. But historically, the massive wealth creation and efficiency gains of these innovations have opened entirely new, unforeseen industries.

Here are three classic top innovations where short-term displacement eventually gave way to massive long-term employment booms.

In the early 19th century, the introduction of mechanized looms (like the power loom) turned the textile industry upside down.

When Henry Ford's Model T made cars accessible to the masses in the early 1900s, it signaled the end of a centuries-old transportation system.

When personal computers entered the office in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the electronic spreadsheet was the defining application that changed corporate America.

Economist Joseph Schumpeter called this process "creative destruction." Technology rarely eliminates work. Instead, it shifts human labor up the value chain by automating the repetitive tasks and creating entirely new categories of work that were previously unimaginable.

When people say "AI," it sounds like a singular, looming entity — a sci-fi monolith or a new form of life. It creates a vast canvas for projection, usually colored by our deepest anxieties about losing control.

There is a phenomenon where an abbreviation morphs into a brand, and that brand carries a mystique the literal words cannot sustain.

But when you force yourself to say the full words — "artificial intelligence" — the illusion begins to crack. "Artificial" reminds you that it is a human-made imitation, a simulation built out of statistics and copper. "Intelligence" in this context is just a technical label for pattern recognition and data processing, not a living “soul.” Demystifying the acronym strips away its god-like aura.

Here are more examples where abbreviations have run amok, creating a sense of vague power, uncertainty, or catastrophe the literal words don't quite justify:

When people say UAP (or its predecessor, UFO), the three letters act as a heavy-handed wink toward extraterrestrials, government cover-ups, and sci-fi mysteries. It sounds sleek, official, and ominous.

But when you force yourself to say the full words — "unidentified anomalous phenomena” — the grand illusion completely evaporates into a cloud of mundane bureaucracy.

Technology has always involved trade-offs. Automobiles brought accidents. Electricity brought electrocution. The internet enabled fraud alongside unprecedented access to information. Every transformative innovation has created new risks even as it delivered enormous benefits.

Artificial intelligence will be no different. It will be misused by criminals. It will disrupt industries. Some occupations will disappear, while entirely new ones emerge. Those risks deserve serious attention, but they should be managed — not mistaken for reasons to reject progress.

For long-term investors, the lesson is straightforward. History consistently rewards those who recognize that innovation creates more value than it destroys. The path is rarely smooth, but human ingenuity has an extraordinary record of expanding opportunity rather than exhausting it.

The greatest risk for long-term investors is not that artificial intelligence will change the world. It almost certainly will. The greater risk is assuming this time, for the first time in history, human innovation will stop creating more opportunities than it destroys.