I’ve been pondering the intersection of revenue per employee pressure with the lack of clarity of AI costs and wondering how this all plays out.  I think the interesting bit remains bundled in the question of who benefits from all this AI innovation.  Is the benefit and cost aligned for sustained value creation or are we squeezing some sectors to benefit others?

I struggle to believe that the value capture and value sharing will be consistent and/or equitable.  I ponder what we gain and what we lose and how the second and third order impacts get measured and understood.  Especially those impacts that are not aligned in time.  For me inventing the future requires going deep on both risks and opportunities but that process is not linear or balanced.

When looking at the state of the industry and economy today you can’t help but recognize a bubble (one that I believe is a superset of the dot-com bubble and 2008), simple questions like the future state of employment, the impacts to the environment and crazy concepts like peace.

This week I finished listening to The Silk Roads (I know I’ve mentioned this a few times, it’s a big book and has a lot to ponder).  I loved the centering of history in a context that my spotty education didn’t really cover [Asia] and the connections I’m sure I would have missed in my youth even if it was.

Reflecting on how empires were built and how they declined feels worth understanding right now.  One thing I had not fully appreciated was how the “too big to fail” East India Company played a role in the forming of America.  A very long way to say that I get a sense that it’s impossible to zoom out too far on the current state of things today - not all the patterns will be clear for some time, but we are most certainly at a moment of material change.

Thanks for coming on this journey with me.  Starting with reflection and curiosity is the best path I know to learning and planning.

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** Typos and poor grammar either because I'm too lazy to edit properly, or to make you feel confident this was written by a flawed human and not AI generated.