Whisk Me Away
I am comforted by thinking that what I am experiencing in life is not so very different from what others my age are going through. I am not talking about physical maladies (though we all have our own “organ recitals” to go through on any given day). I am also not talking about financial affairs. I just saw a piece by an MBA classmate of mine that has built a practice of giving general life coaching advice to people, and I must say I don’t know that I get that. Is there really a viable market and career in kibitzing informally to help people do what they all know they should do, but perhaps don’t? I noticed that her latest tidbit was to “pay yourself first” by putting money aside in savings so that you trick yourself into not spending it. Isn’t that what Christmas Club accounts were all about, and does the world really need that sort of crutch any more? Teaching me how to live within my means when I am 70 seems a bit like closing the barn door after whatever cows were going to wander out have already done so. And this is not even about the political landscape as all of us better educated sorts in America are huddling in the corner praying that our paltry donations to any and every Democratic candidate for Congress that finds his or her way to our door, will fend off the demon autocrat that runs around threatening our existence, perhaps our freedom (my blog alone puts me in somebody’s bullseye, I am sure), and certainly our sense of civility and gentility. No, this is about getting left behind by the steady advancement of the world of technology and what it all means for our lives.
You may have guessed it by now, but I am greatly bothered by the telltale signs of change that the stock market delivers to us and tells us what the new new thing (thank you Michael Lewis for defining that “thing” as you did 25 years ago) is all about. Its bad enough to be forced in 1999 to consider that your professional life of 25 years is not what you thought and knew that it was not so very new and that the newest of the new things is something that has gone mainstream and therefore you have no choice but to get to know about it. What was that? In 1999 that was about the combination of high tech and the internet, which then became big tech and social media and has now become artificial intelligence. I’ve sort of buried the lead here because I am so blown away by it. Nvidia (NVDA), the “world leader in artificial intelligence” just burst through the $3 trillion valuation level and passed Microsoft and Apple as though they were standing still. It has tripled in value just this year, having surpassed $1 trillion on a stable basis at the beginning of the year. It took both Apple and Microsoft many years to accomplish that almost unimaginable feat. I can almost feel the quadrillion word inflating in the Google search terms as I write this.
Bill Gates is a year younger than me. He is Vintage ‘55 and I am Vintage ‘54. Microsoft became the biggest phenomenon of my early life by prying the personal computer out of the files of Popular Mechanics and into our offices, studies, living rooms, bedrooms, and even kitchens (I hesitate to say bathrooms, because that is a bridge too far). Our fathers lived the era of IBM. Their fathers were of the Interstate Highway System. Their fathers got off the horse and onto the internal combustion machine. Their fathers rolled westward in wagons. IBM helped land a man on the moon in the late 60’s. The oil giants roamed the earth in the 70’s. Microsoft became the world’s largest company in the late 1980’s when I was in the middle of my career. Even though Steve Jobs was a contemporary of Bill Gates and me (he was actually Vintage ‘55 as well), he had to spend a lot of time wandering in the wilderness and the more commercial Gates took center stage in commercialized technology. Jobs managed to remount Apple in time to drive us from a technologically “better” operating system and things such as the Mouse and GUI screens into the era of the truly personal realm of technology. He took us from the office into our pocket with the iPod and eventually the iPhone, which integrated the verbal communicator with the computer and the home entertainment system all packaged as the smartphone. What Gates did for the office, Jobs did for the world, allowing us to work and play wherever we wanted.
Apple became the world’s largest company a mere thirteen years ago in 2011. It coincided well with my approach to retirement age as I started to downshift my career (somewhat voluntary and a lot involuntarily). I just heard a friend tell me that he and his son came apart over the fact that the kid told his father to invest his (the kid’s) money in Apple and the father did somewhat, but not entirely. That caused the kid to blow a fuse when he learned that the father’s attempt at prudence had left the kid with less of a nest egg than he thought he was due. This, notwithstanding that the money had always been from the father’s labors, which opens up a whole entitlement issue I will not address here. The point is that we have been living in the post-Microsoft world for some time and instead have been basking in the Golden Age of Apple…until now. Now it is what I will opinionatedly call the post-apocalyptic era of Nvidia. Microsoft as a word invites me in. Apple as a word makes me feel organic and holistic. Nvidia feels very Ex-Machina. It even sounds like a fantasy world that is beyond Dune and not quite all the way to Narnia. It scares me and I think it is supposed to.
Had I done with Nvidia (NVDA) what I and my friend should have done with Apple (AAPL) and I wish I had been smart enough to do with Microsoft (MSFT), I would be as wealthy as Jeff Bezos (who?). But wealth is not the central issue here. What do I care if Jensen Huang of Nvidia is tossing Bill Gates (and hopefully Elon Musk soon enough) off the top of the wealth mountain? I don’t. But now I have to stop and figure out, like I did with Apple and Microsoft, how Nvidia is going to change my life and yours. I am becoming weary of this technological treadmill. I can’t shut my brain off and just coast along the Interstate Highway system that was born the same year of my birth. I wish I could, but instead I get whisked away into the next dreamland of imagination, trying to think about where AI is going to take me next. I sat here 18 months ago and watched the AI baby in the form of Chat GPT and Generative AI get born. It should be walking and ready for toddlerhood, but instead it is running around kicking over tombstones in random acts of juvenile delinquency. God knows what it will do to me if and when it notices me cowering the corner. I can stand up and face it like the boy in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but it might squash me rather than whisk me away to a better place.