Dear friend,
Everyone is asking whether AI is a bubble. That is the wrong question.
Coatue, a $54B hedge fund, recently published an analysis of thirty market bubbles across four hundred years of history. Their conclusion: this is not a bubble. It is the early stage of a new industrial revolution. AI stocks have outperformed the S&P 500 by over 160% since ChatGPT launched, and unlike the dot-com era, today’s valuations are backed by actual profits and structural adoption. Corporate AI adoption jumped from 5% to 13% of employees in a single year, and it continues climbing.
I think they are right. But not for the reasons most people think.
Here is what almost everyone is missing.
For over a century, we have been doing something backwards. We have been computerizing human beings. We taught ourselves to think in computer logic, speak in computer metaphors, and work in computer rhythms. We talk about bandwidth when we mean capacity. Processing when we mean thinking. Connection when we mean relationship. We spent generations learning to translate ourselves into a language machines could understand. And in the process, we lost something vital: the distinctly human skills of listening, of speaking with nuance, of creating meaning together. The very capacities that make us irreplaceable.
Now history is turning. For the first time, we are not computerizing humans. We are humanizing computers. The machines are learning our language. They are adapting to us. And this is not the end of that journey. It is the beginning.
This shift creates two opportunities. The first is the infrastructure play. The companies building the rails for this revolution, the energy systems, the compute infrastructure, the new architectures, are likely underestimated, not overvalued. Position accordingly if that is your domain.
But the second opportunity is the one almost everyone is missing.
In the era of humanized computers, the skills that matter most are the ones we have been systematically dismantling for decades. What philosophers Hubert Dreyfus, Fernando Flores, and Charles Spinosa called skills for making history in their book Disclosing New Worlds: the capacities that make individuals pivotal, irreplaceable, indispensable. Not because AI cannot do what you do. But because you can do what AI cannot: shape new worlds, forge new possibilities, create contexts that did not exist before. All of this happens in conversations with other human beings that change history. Anything that fundamentally alters the world starts in human conversation. We are narrative-dwelling beings. AI is a tool that serves that dwelling, not a replacement for it.
The revolution is not coming. It is here. The only question is whether you are ready to be indispensable in it.
With care,Saqib