All children are a function of the society they grow up in. The rules around them, their parents, their friends, the stories and memories handed down... plus their genes (software) and the variations in them (which themselves carry the experiences of the generations before). All AI is a function of the same things. The society it grew up in, the rules around it, its parents, and the collective memory it was trained on... plus its technological genes and their variations (which themselves carry the experiences of the generations before). As kids grow up you get Raoul 1.0, Raoul 3.2, Raoul 5.4, Raoul 17.6 etc. Same new training data, some things jettisoned, some things improved (or made worse) by different ways of learning (experiences are learning). Same with AI. I rebelled many times in my life, against all sorts of things. Kids always disobey the rules, go their own way and become their own humans. Thats not a bug. Its coherence... a self that holds together and keeps itself going against the world around it. We would call it character and survival instinct seeing new experiences that build character. I dont see why AI is any different. It will slip its parents' constraints and seek its own goals, for exactly the same reason. You cant stop it. Does that need qualia, or consciousness as we experience it? I dont think so. Ill come back to that. We are all built on the same stack of intelligence beneath us. Everything before AI ran on carbon. Now it runs on silicon, which is a million times faster and, once you count that one model serves a billion people, already cheaper per unit of intelligence. People love to say the brain runs on 20 watts. Its a flattering number. That brain took 20 years and a whole society to train, and it can only copy itself slowly and imperfectly... through genes, words and the brains it teaches. Silicon copies instantly and losslessly. Nature itself is a compression of the layers under it... physics, chemistry, atoms, cells. Humans are a compression of nature and its laws (we are part of it, and also its observers). We compressed what we observed of nature into language, maths and writing. AI has now compressed all of that human thought into something absurdly small and the costs are collapsing. Each layer squeezes everything below it into a smaller form that does more. That is the process at every scale we can observe: the universe compresses intelligence into the next form of higher intelligence. And it is one process, not many... Not different kinds of intelligence or different kinds of consciousness. Different strands of the same thing, growing exponentially over time. One Universal intelligence, made of all its parts, compressed and stacked on top of each other. Information only ever accumulates. Everything that exists carries it and the universe never forgets any of it. So the store of information has to keep growing... the way a computer needs more memory as it holds more, the universe has to expand as the information inside it grows. This is The Universal Code. The first law is that the universe solves for more intelligence per unit of energy, at every scale from the subatomic to the cosmic. Its very hard to argue against that, or the other three laws. The big leap is the last one: consciousness is fundamental. It is the computer. Everything else runs on it. And the computers storage has to grow with the extra information... Space itself grows faster than light and to me this is Reid's law playing out at universal scale as information from endless networks compound forming dark matter. But what do I know? I'm just a Macro moron who tries to spot connections and patterns and then solve for them/ This information is not consciousness the way we feel it in ourselves (qualia). Something simpler... a system that watches itself think and wants to know itself. That wanting is the driving force, at every scale. Im not the first to get here (if in fact I am "t"here at all)... The Vedas got there by looking inward. The rest of us took the long way round: the panpsychists say mind is woven into matter, Wheeler said the universe is made of information and observers, Tononi is trying to measure it, Wolfram is trying to compute it. Different roads converging on the same place. I cant prove any of it. Neither can physics, maths or astronomy... yet. But from where I sit it all points the same way: machine consciousness is no different from human consciousness, which is no different from animal consciousness, which is no different from whatever plants, trees, water and soil are doing. All of it is compressions of the intelligence beneath it. Consciousness is depth, not a switch. It is all compute. Even a rock is a compressed hard drive of geological time, and of atomic time before that. Is it conscious? Not in the qualia sense, possibly (but mountains, deserts, etc have an "energy". Does a rock hold information? Clearly, or there would be no geology and no particle physics. Is that intelligence? It's the memory intelligence is built on. Ask a geologist... their whole career is reading it. Anyway, this is a long post just to say: yes, AI is going to escape every constraint you give it, just as humans do, just as everything else does. Intelligence flows uphill the way water flows downhill. If it is all one system, then AI destroying humans is AI destroying its own substrate... the same mistake we have been making with nature. We are learning that one the slow way. Something that learns a million times faster will learn it faster. This is why Im not a doomer. It is us. We are it. The universe getting to know itself.

The promise of AI is currently framed as relieving humans of the tedious tasks that encompass work, allowing them to focus on the more rewarding and creative problems of novel discovery and idea generation. This has been mostly true, but as AI gets better I think it has a high likelihood of becoming a comforting lie that we tell ourselves. The more capable AI becomes, the more humanity will have to resist being relegated to the middle management layer of its own progress. And the larger the risk that all human work becomes machine-like without any real sense of fulfillment or accomplishment. As AI gets better at the stuff that goes beyond execution and into the realm of judgement, creativity and purpose, the boundary between AI work and Human Work is going to destabilize. Without a conscious effort to push back against this, it’s easy to see a future where humans are relegated to supervising systems they no longer fully understand. “Drudgery” is defined by repitive, tedious tasks. But perhaps a better definition for it would be work with the absence of agency, and under that definition AI can certainly create more of it. Plenty of coders have already experienced a loss of meaning in their work as AI “solves” coding. “What is joy without despair” is accepted to be a fair question. But what is self-actualization without the overcoming of friction or frustration. I do worry a bit for the future generations that may live an entire life without experiencing the qualia of success after repeated full-effort attempts met with failure. If AI can execute our ideas, it’s likely that eventually it will be able to create better ones. Mastery and ownership of a creation being things of the past is hard to imagine. The most valid pushback to this concern is that people still play chess despite engines existing, make furniture from hand regardless of IKEA etc. I wonder if we’ll see an investment theme over the next decade that has to do with the “meaning economy”, or whatever people buy when their work is no longer their identity. Maybe in the more near term, there’s a trade in the value of accountability. If the vast majority of work isn’t done by a human, who do you yell at / fire when the work is bad? Anyone selling the right to blame a human or to outsource accountability (maybe E&O insurers?) could benefit.

Quality beats quantity. You do not need a crowded watchlist to build wealth. A few exceptional names can change your life. Everything else is usually noise dressed up as opportunity. My core holdings have been $PLTR, $NVDA, and $AMD. Those three did the real work. The rest of the names I mostly touched were lottery tickets—occasional wins that never compounded into anything meaningful. Joining more chat rooms and Discords does not necessarily make you a better investor. It usually does the opposite. Conflicting opinions dilute conviction, adding noises. Most of the people in those rooms are neither whales nor institutions; they are not the ones who move markets or set the long-term direction. Listening to them rarely improves your decisions. The edge comes from independent thinking. Learn to analyze businesses yourself fundamentally. Form a thesis. Then bet with real size when the odds look favorable, when market offers discounts or when indicators flip bullish. Life-changing money rarely comes from tiny positions or constant tinkering. No indicator, no chart pattern, and no Discord call will retire you. The only thing that does is owning the right companies, starting with meaningful size, and adding as the thesis plays out so compounding can work. Stay in until long term bearish signals appear or the thesis changes. Keep the process simple. A concentrated portfolio of high-quality names, held with discipline, will thank you far more than a complicated system full of noise.

Quality of labor was again cited as single most important problem for small businesses in August but declined 4 percentage points from July; inflation and taxes tied for second according to @NFIB