| Then came the internet. This time, the fear targeted brick-and-mortar stores, travel agents, publishers, brokers - anyone who acted as a middleman. Some of those fears were justified. Malls emptied. (Especially strip malls, which have truly decimated.) Classified ads died. Travel agents shrank as a profession. But the internet didn't destroy commerce. It simply changed it. E-commerce, digital marketing, logistics networks, payment platforms, content creation, app development, cybersecurity - millions of jobs that literally could not have existed before suddenly did. The internet replaced or eliminated clumsy or expensive intermediaries. And created whole new layers of value. Now, however, it's AI's turn to wear the black hat. People look at large language models, image generators, and automation tools and see a machine that can write, design, code, analyze, and talk. For the first time, the fear feels personal to white-collar workers - the people who were supposed to be safe: Writers, accountants, analysts, customer support agents, paralegals. The anxiety is understandable. When a tool can do in seconds what took you hours, it's hard not to imagine yourself being edged out. Yet this fear, too, is overstated. AI is already cutting costs for businesses in concrete ways. Customer support chatbots handle routine questions 24/7, reducing wait times and freeing human agents to handle complex cases. Marketing teams use AI to draft copy, test variations, and analyze performance faster and cheaper than ever. Developers use AI assistants to debug code, write boilerplate, and move faster. Supply chains use AI for demand forecasting, reducing waste and shortages. Doctors use AI to read scans and flag anomalies earlier. Lawyers use it to review documents in minutes instead of weeks. None of this removes humans from the loop. What it removes is drudgery. And the benefits spill into everyday life. AI-powered navigation saves time and fuel. Recommendation systems help people find products and information that fit them. Accessibility tools - speech-to-text, text-to-speech, real-time translation - make the world usable for people who were previously locked out. Medical research accelerates. Small businesses gain tools that used to be available only to massive corporations. (A solo entrepreneur can now compete with teams that once required entire departments.) What's happening is not job destruction but task compression. AI eats the repetitive, predictable parts of work. That's terrifying if your job is nothing but repetition - but most jobs aren't. They're judgment, context, ethics, creativity, persuasion, and responsibility layered on top of routine tasks. When the routine layers disappear, productivity jumps. And when productivity jumps, costs come down and demand increases. In a dynamic economy, new jobs don't come from protecting old inefficiencies. They are created as innovation increases and efficiency improves. Farmers didn't disappear. They became fewer and more productive, while society gained teachers, engineers, designers, nurses, and artists. Office automation didn't eliminate work. It created more knowledge work. The internet didn't end retail. It transformed it, making buying and selling quicker, easier and more lucrative. AI will do the same. We'll see new roles - AI trainers, auditors, ethicists, workflow designers, human-AI interface specialists, and jobs we don't have names for yet. More importantly, we'll see existing roles stretch. A single person will do what five used to. Not because five people are no longer needed in the workforce, but because those four others can now do something of greater value. I'm not suggesting the transition will be easy. Some people will need to reskill. But work is never guaranteed to stay the same. The future belongs - as it always has - to lifelong learners. Capitalists will always find new ways to be productive once old ways become obsolete. In sum, AI isn't the end of work, despite the pronouncements of some techno-optimists and a few self-styled "futurists." This is how progress has always worked - awkwardly, unevenly. And with much "creative destruction," some of it painful. The good part? Ultimately, this will favor consumers, employees... and shareholders. Good investing, Alex | 
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