Trimbathcreative's Blog (Tom Trimbath)

It was a little thing. The cavity was probably less than a millimeter per side. I’m glad I could pay for it to be filled. As usual, I’m in the midst of substantial projects that take months or years, and in some cases, tens of thousands of dollars. Gotta keep doing them. But can’t ignore the small things. The other day I was given a reminder that the smallest things can have enormous effects.

What do you do when sitting in the dentist’s chair? I ponder, then wince, then ponder and wonder, and wince, and wonder how it can take a half hour of effort and hundreds of dollars of expertise to patch a cubic millimeter of me. They did a fine job, but my jaw was sore for the rest of the day. Of course, that’s better than the eventual pain if I ignored it. That would cost time as I complained, more money to fix, and the recovery could’ve taken much longer.

Later that day, I was taking drugs. Legal drugs. You know, the ones the doctor prescribes. None of them were for that pain. The pain was temporary and manageable. (As I type, I’m waiting for ibuprofen to dull a familiar muscle spasm. I started the day with a good hike, three hours on Hurricane Ridge. My body is reminding me that exertion was expended. Temporary and manageable, but it makes it hard to sit and type.) A couple of the doctors’ drugs are tiny, about half the size of an aspirin. I weigh over 200 pounds. Somehow, the chemicals in those pills can survive my digestive system, wander through my body, and work their wonders. And as I recall, most pills are mostly filler. That’s concentrated power. 

By this evening (I’m typing in the late afternoon), my twitches will recede and I’ll be able to sit in front of The Big Computer (really just my newest laptop) and dive into editing the sequel to Firewatcher. Editing is a big job. I’m impressed with the professional editors. Editing is a task of finding nearly-infinite minutea. The text contains over 110,000 words. Let’s keep it simple. That’s over 100,000 opportunities to use the wrong word. The average letters per word is five, so that’s over half of a million letters to check. Don’t expect zero errors. A 1% error rate means 1,000 mistakes. A 0.1% error rate is still 100 errors. A book with 100 errors can be painful for some readers. They’ve probably already reacted to the typo I left in the title of this post. My apologies, but it made a point with me, and I’m trying to understand what that is. Lots of little things, and a mistaken word can turn a character into a villian or a hero or a farce. (I gotta decide on the name of that thing.)

A nailhead was sticking out of a piece of furniture. A bee stung me on my knee. Sunshine reflecting off a car’s rear window momentarily blinded me. A popcorn kernel split a tooth. A nail punctured a tire. We devote ourselves to big things (#MassiveUnderstatement as my friends obsess over football or politics or both), but the little things demand our attention; and we benefit from attending to them.

And then there’s the trite list of cuteness as a child see their first grasshopper, a butterfly flutters by, a piece of chocolate gets popped into a mouth, a song shows up at just the right time, a smile from a stranger truly does look bright. I’m remembering a day when someone said, “It is good to see you!” and they really meant it, including the exclamation point. (I thank for being here, by the way.)

And then came the reminder of little things that I wasn’t even aware of. Someone thanked me for something I said. I don’t even remember saying it. They told me that because I thanked them for something they said. They don’t remember saying it. I then told them a couple of stories where others have unexpectedly thanked me. Someone I barely knew came up to me after some meeting and thanked me for encouraging them to pursue their dream project. Evidently, most of the audience tuned them out, but they were encouraged simply because I paid attention to them, nodded appropriately, and probably did something else. No need for great exhortations. I simply paid attention to them. Another person thanked me because I listened. She was ignored, partly because her idea was unconventional, and possibly because they couldn’t understand why she’d be so passionate about such an unfashionable topic. She did all the work, but she made sure she thanked me for listening. She called me after Hollywood listened, funded, and filmed her documentary.

I see little things making a big difference regularly. Sure, this blog is about personal finance, and in personal finance, small decisions can have major effects, but the practice of paying attention anywhere can be valuable – even indirectly. 

OK. It’s time to polish and post, so I can make dinner, so I can dive back into the “nearly-infinite minutia” of editing my scifi novel. Now’s when I have to edit the aliens’ language, vocabulary, grammar, and cultural references. Ugh. I did this to myself. I know. Ugh. The alien (though only from the human perspective), Erle’, is a nice genderless lifeform, and wouldn’t complain too much if I’ve typed Earl instead, but it would be nice to get it right. It’s the little things, you know? Hmm. Maybe I can blame spellcheck.

First, a nap.

Whew. What a 24 hours? What? You don’t know? How would you? Let me walk you through the wild swings of investing in tiny stocks. Today’s stock: LUNR. They got great news. Didn’t they?

Some background: 
LUNR is a company that is literally working out of this world. Their market is the business of exploring and exploiting the moon. Might as well call it exploiting, because that’s what moon mining is. The alternative is exploiting our planet and doing so inefficiently. People want to do stuff on the moon, then use the stuff that’s there rather than here. If we’re going to build a lifeboat for the species, it makes sense for it to be on a different berth. Currently, their tasks are simpler: landing rovers, launching moon satellites, etc. Think of the Earth observation stuff we did fifty years ago. Hopefully, the trading symbol makes sense now, LUNR. The company name doesn’t, Intuitive Machines. I suspect there was reasoning there. I don’t plan to dive into it, yet.

I bought stock in them recently. (https://trimbathcreative.net/?s=LUNR) I am an ex-aerospace engineer, so I have a better chance than many analysts at understanding what they’re doing. Imagine investing in aerospace in 1970. There was pain, but eventually, there was gain.

At the end of most trading days, I log in and look for news. Usually, there’s nothing. Huh? Hey, the stock was up 1.27% after the market closed. Nothing grand, but something must be going on. Huh? It wasn’t up 1.27%. It was up $1.27. Check those units. $1.27 on a stock that was trading for under $5 is a big jump. When I checked, LUNR was up over 20%. That’s worth rescheduling a bit of the day.

The gain looked like it was going to happen far sooner than fifty years. (https://www.intuitivemachines.com/post/intuitive-machines-strengthens-lunar-service-capabilities-with-116-9-million-nasa-lunar-contract-aw) LUNR has already successfully completed launches and landings (ignore the part where it fell over), and has been gaining credibility. Thursday afternoon (August 29, 2024), after the market closed, they announced a $116.9M contract with NASA. The most they ever made in a year was about $86M. This is significant. Their market cap was only about $500M. That’s a lot of revenue and a lot of asset growth – before expenses, or course, and before the work’s been done.

Some folks posted about checking every few minutes. It can be a heady time. Enthusiasm is unleashed and with reason. Sometimes, that enthusiasm has been steeping for years. What a relief, especially for those investors. 

I wasn’t as enamoured with the news. The post- and pre- markets are squirrely. They can be indicators, but they can also be simply confused. I checked every few hours, just for good grins.

Sleep happened in there somewhere, but not enough to keep me from taking that nap.
I woke up with anticipation. How did the pre-market do? Up. Still up. Good. It was holding, with some randomness as people interpreted the news. Big firms like Microsoft may barely budge over $116.9M. Even at that, I suspect a crowd of analysts would dive in to decide whether MSFT should nudge up and by how much. If LUNR had late-night analysts, I can imagine them all fitting into one of the larger booths at Denny’s.

6:30AM. The market opened. The previous price at market close had been $4.82. The price spiked to $6. There was some bobbling of the price, but that is the market doing what the market does, balancing the buys and sells to see what the new value is. Maybe the overshoot should come down to $5.60, or a few hours later $5.20, or by the end of the day’s $4.97. A 3% gain on such significant news. All that adrenaline draining and wasted, at least for some. For me, I’ve seen it before. Good news is good news. Celebrate that. The daily details aren’t as important unless the stock needs to be converted to cash for an emergency.

Why only move up 3%? The deed’s not done. Rockets blow up. Rovers fall over. Landers can land too hard, or not at all. Space is risky business. Even Elon loses rockets.

That puts the stock within a few percent of where it was a year ago.

The market value of a company can be based on its future revenues discounted by risk. A $116.9M check is worth $116.9M, but work must be done, which is a risk; rockets and such must be launched, orbited, and landed, which are risks; competition happens; disasters at the Earth facilities can happen; budget cuts happen; etc.; etc.; etc. If that check is going to arrive later, then inflation diminishes it. That reduces its present value. The check may be for $116.9M, but its value to the company and its influence on the stock is different. The analysts guess. The investors decide. Reality eventually reveals the truth.

That $116.9M check can also be worth more than $116.9M. The company is getting more business, and significant business. At some point, startups that succeed grow from hopefuls that may have just been lucky, to established businesses with confident revenues and income. It is only in retrospect that a SpaceX has hit its major milestone. Is this LUNR’s? Optimists may say yes. Pessimists may say no, or maybe not yet. Investors get to decide what are the odds, what level of risk are they comfortable with; and balance that against the possibility of gains. Wait too long and the risk may be gone, as well as the stock gains.

Celebrate good news for the news. Tonight’s dinner is ribs roasted at home, homemade cornbread, roasted corn on the cob, and probably some alcoholic beverage. (I bought a ridiculously sized bottle of local whiskey because it was on sale. Now, there’s value!) 

At a deeper level, as an investor, I am relaxing into the decision I made to buy the stock. That extra bit of confidence has a value as well. I didn’t and don’t plan on selling any time soon, so this is like watching a bare root tree prove itself with its first season of blossoms. Time to take a chair and a drink and sit and think as I watch the garden grow.

Congratulations to the people doing the work. Nicely done. I hope you get to celebrate, too.

I also hope I sleep better tonight.

OK, intuition, why are you encouraging me to write about this stock, LUNR, on this day, August 23, 2024? I produced a video about it over a year ago. (March 2023 –  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzVaEu7mty0) I bought stock in it. (June 2024) Pardon me as I have an unintentional Duh moment as I realize my intuition was inspiring me to write about Intuitive Machines, a name that has no apparent connection to their products, but there it is. The universe has a sense of humor. The fact that the stock was up over 29% this week is probably more inspirational. So, what’s going on, and how does it affect my personal finances?

Small companies can have strange stock moves. They can languish for years until someone thinks they’re worth much more or much less than the current market, and a small surge in the stock can become a bigger surge in the stock. I suspect that analysts can’t devote enough time to remain aware of every aspect of every small company. One may do an analysis, and others move because the first one did. Companies like LUNR have finance spikes and shortfalls. Starbucks started by selling lots of cups of coffee, something that happened every few seconds. LUNR is dealing with rockets, satellites, and rovers, the sorts of things that rely on singular events like rocket launches and vehicle landings. Their products can literally go boom or bust, but hopefully go whoosh and land quietly.

None of that happened this week. There’s news of a collaboration. The recent finance report looked fine enough. Eventually, there’ll be another launch and such. And the stock went up as much as it did.

It went up to about $6 and closed at $5.24. It started the week at about $4, so that was good, but keep in mind that when I produced that video, the stock was at over $13, down from their all-time peak (so far) of over $40. Hello, volatility. I bought it for about $5, so this has been a lot of up and down for not much movement, and that’s OK.

You might notice that, while I track these smaller companies and their stocks I do not get deep into the details. I am Not a finance professional. They get to do that sort of thing. I’ve also learned that whether analyst or amateur, someone somewhere out there knows more than me, and may know more than everyone else. Small companies can have surprising successes that are kept officially quiet, but an investor who lives near the company may notice a busy parking lot on a Sunday, or a lot of rental or government cars, or big deliveries. Some discussion boards (particularly about MVIS) are populated by people who trawl (not troll) through LinkedIn updates and job ads to see what positions are new and who is celebrating their new job. I’ve found that when I get into that much detail I’ve usually missed a more important detail right beside it. I watch the big picture, spend less time, and have about as much success.

LUNR (lunar, get it?) is potentially rewarding enough that I invested some of my house sale money into it, but it is risky enough that I didn’t max out on the possibilities. I may miss out on the possible upside, but rockets do go boom and bust in seconds.

Most of my other stocks are in similar situations, even though they’re in different industries. Diversification! As a portfolio, it means that something is usually happening. Life ain’t dull.
Life may not be dull, but such swings are normal. I celebrate the gains and recognize the losses, but the real progress is a successful launch and landing; or in biotechs, an FDA approval; or in any of them, a significant customer. LUNR has done enough to gather some attention, but I think few folks barely look past SpaceX, Boeing, Lockheed, or ESA to see the recent independents who are innovating rocket science and space missions. 

Up 29% in a week with no headline news? Imagine what their week will be like when they land on the moon and don’t fall over. What was that peak price? If things go well, the stock can rocket past it, too.

We can file this under my “Fresh Ideas” hashtag. A new(?) idea for old service stations.

Look at that poor pump. Some are old enough that, when gas prices finally rose above a dollar, they had to paint a $1 on it. They never expected prices to go that high. Those of us who are old enough may remember checkbooks where all the checks had a 19__ printed on them because years starting with a 2 were too far in the future to worry about. (My mind digressed as I wondered what we’re using today that will be so obviously outdated soon.)  The checks were easy to replace or write over. The gas pumps are harder to figure out what to do with. Here’s one idea I talked about recently on my podcast with Steve Smolinsky, Intriguing Creativity. Don’t have a name yet. Hmm. Maybe by the time I’m done writing this.

Oh woe, what are we going to do with the old corner gas stations? The ones that were true service stations may be more difficult. EVs are here. Cars require more training for their mechanics than before. Much of those sites’ functionality is outdated and fading. 

I remember working at one of the early self-service stations in 1976. Already, there was no service. Pump it yourself (and save! and then banks automated tellers and supermarkets made us do their job), but don’t expect anyone to check your car’s oil, wash the windshield, or pump up your tires. Service with a smile slid as it shifted to being provided from behind a window that had a slot for passing back cash and change. Credit cards were run through a carbon copy device. $2 bills were in style, for a very short while. We still had the hose that rang a bell whenever a car drove onto the lot. Ding. Ding.

Many have morphed into convenience stores, companies that were inspired by 7-11 and surpassed it, at least in ubiquity.

One that didn’t morph is about four miles from my new old big tiny house (MyTinyExperiment.com). It’s the one with rusted pumps. Like many, it is a corner eye-sore. It is also an opportunity for contemporary photography. What message do you want? Decay and ruin and neglect? Nature creeping through the cracks? Reflections on the history and the people who worked there?

But, it is also a commercial property at the intersection of a rural and soon-to-be less rural area. It is paved. It has a building. It has utilities. It has a story, I’m sure. It also probably has underground gas tanks that may need to be removed, or at least made safe. The pumps could stay or go – at a price. It has potential.

And it is not alone.

(Rhetorically) How many such places have we built around the world? Many are dying because they aren’t needed, or at least didn’t keep up with gas prices. The new one kitty-corner across the street is far fancier, bigger, and even sells liquor. It serves that purpose and more, and yet I think may be destined for a similar fate. But, back to the old, unused one. Finally, I’ll get around to telling you the idea.

(By the way, literary types may moan about this style of writing, but this is a better and cleaned-up example of how my creative side works. You do not want to see the un-cleaned-up example.)

Re-open the place as a community space, for-profit or non-profit, isn’t as important. Clean it up. Make it safe, at least eventually deal with those tanks, and pour the newest technology into it: high-speed internet and caffeinated drinks. Add sugar, as reasonable. Redecorate, of course. As I type this, I wonder if Starbucks has already considered this. If not, who will? 

People are de-urbanizing. Some are becoming modern nomads. I’ve progressively moved farther from Seattle’s metropolis since 1992. For about a decade prior to that, I was a suburbanite because my job was Boeing, not downtown anywhere. Now, I live seven miles outside of a tourist town that has always been undergoing the influx of ex-city folks. As a realtor (now ex-), I worked with a lot of people who wanted to be less crowded. Losing the services of a city has been easier as technology has allowed more remote communication, then shopping, and learning, and working. There are some folks who live out here, but who really live in there, inside their computers. You and I are both here now, just asynchronously. 

These corner stations could fit into the role of supplying some of those extra services, and do so in a way that encourages community, or at least seeing other people in the real world. 

There is more than a spectrum of what these places could be. Starbucks is a good model, though I’d recommend skipping the drive-through. Get out of your car and be a person among people. Maybe put a drive-through coffee kiosk into one of those little booths if there’s enough parking lot for it. (Is that what the service bays could become?) There’s really no need to be specific about how it will be used. Financiers may want details, but people will define the space by the way they use it. Coffeeshop? Co-works? Package pickup site? A quiet place to recharge, or a noisy place where kids can scream? (No, kids. You may not play in the grease pit – but with some work it would be awesome to fill that with bouncy balls – or a koi pond.) The neighborhood will decide.

But there will be work to get done. No surprise. Even without those tanks, renovating a building isn’t trivial. But it is possible. 

The specific site that inspired this idea is across the street from one of my favorite markets, definitely more farmers’ market than supermarket. Down the street is an awesome cidery that has expanded out into a family-friendly event center and foodie destination. A post office is nearby. So is a school. And so is an increasing influx (there’s got to be a better word) of city people spending time in rural areas. (Part of which is in a wildfire as I type. It’s a dynamic place and definitely out in the country against the mountains.) And they all circle a building with dusty windows, weed-cracked concrete, and gas pumps that look more like modern art.

OK. So this is just me playing with an idea. But someone is going to see abandoned service stations as the site for some sort of rebirth. When someone finds an ethical, environmental, and economical way to use one service station, they will have created a template for them to do it again, and for someone else to try, too. 

On the personal finance side, I don’t have the resources or skills to remake such a space. I’ll watch to see if someone else does because, if they do, they have the opportunity to build another billion-dollar business, and I’ll hope I can invest in it.

Change is the only constant. 

These were busy businesses. Now, they are not. Hopefully, they will be again. In the meantime, I also started thinking ahead to what’s happening at the station on the other corner. What will their pumps become? And EV charging? The next generation of batteries may make specialized chargers moot. What will happen to all of those Tesla stations? 

Change is the only constant.

Gotta change with it, and maybe guess right about where it is going.

If you want to hear what Steve thought about the idea, listen to Episode 8 of our podcast, IntriguingCreativity.com .

Yep. I bought more stock. But the markets had a terrible week? Rephrase that. Stocks are on sale! So I bought some more, but I also did more research, reflected on history, have painful reminders of catching falling knives, and am glad to buy at discounts. Sounds dull because it is about finance? Trust me. It hasn’t been dull for me. Here’s an update on what, how, and why.

Regular readers know I compile a semi-annual report about my portfolio. (Semi Annual Exercise Mid 2024) This year has been energized because I sold my house, which gave me money, which gave me money that is partly going into the stock market. (Time To Buy But What) Most of the money remains as cash. I’m just not that impulsive.

But I’ve been watching the markets as usual. Even when I am not trading, I watch because it is a real reality show with real consequences. Earlier this week there was news that startled lots of investors. It seemed based on nervousness rather than specific news. The upsets were in the mega-cap stocks like MSFT. My much smaller companies (hey, I own a tiny tiny slice of each – so, mine, mine!) had their stocks affected, but the companies were doing what they’d been doing. That suggest their stocks should too. It doesn’t work that way, of course. Ah, but it was also earnings week for most of them.

News? Not really. Minor disappointments. The perpetuation of hope. Patience continues to be exercised. But their prices changed as skittish investors skittered away because others were skittering away in other companies. Yo. Dudes. Nothing changed, except the price. I bought more.

I did not, however, buy more of everything. At this point conservative investors (not the political kind) may moan about ‘here he goes again’, while more speculative investors may brush off my old style of Long Term Buy and Hold. I figure that puts me in the middle.

I hadn’t suddenly found a new investment, so I reviewed my existing investments. Recent history and fresh earnings reports told me that nothing much had changed. They’re mostly startups, and they’re trying to start up. Always chaotic.

Allow me to review (partly for my own records) how each looks, kinda like a mini-update to my Semi-Annual Exercise.

GERN – They won FDA approval, but the stock hasn’t moved. But, they also are slowly rolling out their commercialization scheme. Progress. Slow, but progress. But also my largest holding. Mathematically they may be the best near-term ROI. In terms of divesification though, I set them aside.

LCTX – Another biotech working towards approval, but that’s a ways off. In the meantime, their stock languishes, but I have a personal limit on how many shares I hold. I’ve maxed out on LCTX.

XOS – They’re where my SOLO shares went. Management has yet to impress me or the market. I’ll give them more time.

WNDW – Management had a major mess that they ‘should’ have recovered from, but evidently, not yet. The company, not just the stock, the company is worth less than some mansions. The stock trades so infrequently that a days volume is a few thousand dollars. I’m sure some independent retail businesses are busier.

LUNR – My space investment, and while I am a fan (my degree is in Aerospace and Ocean Engineering), I consider them risky enough to hold but not add too. The next success may mean I can’t afford to buy in, and that would be good news too. But not now.

SLDP – Really liking owning stock in a solid battery company. I’ll hold, but Samsung’s news seems to have dampened enthusiasm for small companies as if a mega-corp has established dominance.

That leaves the two I bought.

MVIS – The electro-optical component company that has been trying to start up for about thirty years. Yep. They sucked me in again. My history with them is long (follow the hashtag https://trimbathcreative.net/tag/mvis/). Considering my increased portfolio, it felt like a good time to buy more, almost as a balancing issue, but also because I continue to hold optimism for their technology. Their management, well…they’ve yet to find anyone who can get this motor started.

QBTS – Talk about a technology that has great potential, is tough for analysts to analyze, and it cheap – and it got cheaper, at least since I bought it last time. Going to my max number of shares was an easy decision. Why’s the stock down? Analysts understand steadily higher profits. Technologists understand that technology is rarely steady. Leaps happen. Sometimes the leaps are in the science, or the manufacturing, or in the customer base as customers realize why they need it. Once upon a time I had FFIV. Paraphrasing their CEO (the best I’ve met), sales took off when the word about the product got past the gatekeepers of purchasing agents and got to the IT staffs that said they needed to have this, even if management didn’t understand it. I can see that happening with QBTS. I hope. Maxed out.

Through all of this, I am fortunate enough to have over four decades of experience. I’ve cut myself on falling knives before. Falling knives are stocks that are falling. Trying to catch them on the way down can be painful. Conventional wisdom is to let the knife fall, then pick it up. In the reality of the stock market, stocks stop falling somewhere before they hit and stop. They bounce in mid-air. I bought MVIS circa 2000 after the stock fell 20%. Split-adjusted, it peaked at about $500. It ‘bottomed’ at under $30. I bought more. This week’s purchase was at $0.92-ish.

Meanwhile, circa 2000, I bought FFIV after it fell from about $60 to about $20, about where I bought it, and sunk to about $3. Somewhere I bought more. When it hit about $40 about ten years later I sold and made a large downpayment on my first real home. FFIV is trading at about$189 as I type. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes it takes time. Sometimes I wonder how my life would’ve been if I’d held, but that would’ve required living in a rental owned by rats and occupied by black mold. Decisions and choices.

Fear not! AI is already taking over. Any debate is moot. It’s not done, and there isn’t much we can do about it. Congratulate yourself on adapting so well, so far.

AI is not AI is not AI. There are many levels of AI, and we’ve already met the earliest models of them. Think automation. Compare life from fifty years ago to now. We’re using lots of things that are at least somewhat intelligent. A coffee maker isn’t an ideal of artificial intelligence, but it is smart enough to take your commands, brew the coffee, and turn itself off – and maybe stay on just to keep it warm. ‘That’s not AI.’ No, but yes, at least at the level of a toddler savant. 

A coffeemaker is not an ultimate AI, but it is a start.

Spell check is just looking up what you typed against a dictionary. But spell check has to use some intelligence to guess at which word you really wanted. Now, it has graduated to grammar check. It can even have opinions about tone and measures of reading level.

Spell check wasn’t doing the writing, but it can now. And, it is getting better.

Cars are things. We drive them. But, since the introduction of power steering and power braking, our driving has been assisting. That may be a built-in response, but then we upgraded to cruise control, and anti-skid, and power-sharing in 4WD, and now lane-assist, separation distancing, auto parallel parking, and features I’m not familiar with because my car isn’t that fancy. Auto-start? Come-when-you-call? Autonomous operations? Cars have advanced far enough that owners have given up control of maintenance, and mechanics have to trust the computer about what to work on before a human hand does more than open the hood.

Auto automation is not waiting for the ultimate AI; it is doing what it can do with what it has.

Thank the Baby Boom age for what happened to the home. There were some labor saving devices prior to World War II, but soon after peace, the machines began to need user manuals. Now, washing machines are smart enough to confuse users about what cycle to use and why. Ovens and cooktops have safety features that make sure we don’t hurt ourselves, evidently because they take better care of us than we do. Now, so many of them are so intelligent that they can tell us what to shop for. Train yourself on their new language of timers and beepers to draw attention back to their/our task. 

We’ve come a long way from fires for cooking and streams for water, largely because of the increasingly smart systems we’ve created.

For centuries, the most common non-human security system was a dog, or even better, dogs. Maybe some geese. Now, we don’t even have to get up to get the door, or even be home to talk with someone who walked onto the porch – or back door, or into a garage where they shouldn’t be, or… There are systems that detect people and critters, launch a drone, and give you a real-time video of what is happening. These are not dumb systems, but they are getting smarter. Our habits are unique and preditable enough that the sensors can identify the people and the pets, and notify us if something or someone is unfamiliar. Lock or unlock the house without being in the same time zone.

A somewhat intelligent entity is now a gatekeeper, concierge, and guardian at the gate. 

Words were pen and paper. Photos were click and shoot and develop and print. Neither now exist without at least the opportunity to be corrected and improved according to points of style that relied on humans before.

How many people would get lost without GPS?

Voicemail menues and Help bots try to outguess what we want and need. They may save companies money. They may ruin consumer approval. They can be dangerously wrong, but they are young and maturing.

Resumes are read by bots before humans see a few of the total.

Ads aren’t broadcast but are selectively provided based on intelligent guesses based on our recent activities. Spooky.

Doctors, even at the sophisticated level of surgeons, are tapping electronic databases instead of educated and experienced humans. We give them the power.

“I Am Not A Robot”, and the burden of proof is on the human while the power is in the machine.

And then, there’s true Artificial Intelligence. What I’ve written above this paragraph is a series of nuanced interpretations of intelligence. Power steering didn’t start as intelligence, but by design, intelligence was incorporated into something that wasn’t human. We’re done that throughout our culture and civilization. 

One simplistic way to typify Artificial Intelligence is to embody the necessary skills and actions of a human into a machine. We’ve been advancing that front for decades. Rather than worry about the arrival of AI, recognize that we’ve been enabling it throughout our lives. 

Humans are all part of a wide spectrum of skills and actions. None of us can do it all. No regular, stereoptypical AI can do it all. Some of us are great mechanics, but not most of us. An AI can be great at one thing, or a few things, but may not be able to do something some other AI can do.

AI has been arriving like a rising tide. I expect jobs to be lost and industries to fade away, but that has always been the case.

The AI I think is more valid to worry about is the AI that comes after the early AIs. Programmers are already losing control, or at least an understanding of AIs. When AIs start creating better AIs, even ‘our’ AIs may not be able to understand what has happened, what it’s motivations are, and what its intent might be.

That’s the AI that is more than an unknown, it is an unknowable unknown. And, there’s a chance that it will arrive within the period of a mortgage, a career, and definitely a lifetime.

So, here’s the potential personal finance bent on this topic. What do you do about it? For those of us not in the industry, the topic is not academic. I ask myself whether my investments will make sense in an AI-dominated world. 

The same question applies to my lifestyle. I’m glad I moved to a simple tiny house. As simple as it is, little lights populate the night. One caveman image was of someone sitting by a fire at night, ringed with the glowing eyes of creatures watching the human that is huddled by the fire’s security. My nightly walk to the kitchen is accompanied by one-eyed LEDs showing that many somethings await. Fortunately, they are less likely to attack.

And, what if they break? My area underwent an internet outage last night. I planned on working on my book (the sequel to Firewatcher), but I managed to go dancing instead. But that also means I’d doing more work on a Saturday.  Those few hours were critical to some, undoubtedly, but they were an inconvenience to most, at most.

We’ve been driving ourselves to a world where we’re more integrated and automated, and more vulnerable to everything working. Reliability and sustainability are not as valued in the economy as new regardless of improved. Maybe an AI will be smart enough to properly prioritize things without the distraction of human emotions.

Maybe we’ll embrace the impartiality of AI protection, AI justice, AI elected offcials, etc. It might take much from where we are to advance AI to the point that we relinguish control on such systems in an attempt to remove bias and injustice.

We’ve been riding this tide for decades. I doubt we can stop now.

In terms of investing and lifestyle, I take AI as a given. It is going to happen because we’ve been making it happen for a very long time. I haven’t reduced my considerations to a short, concise set of strategies, but I think there’s real non-academic value to adjusting my life given that assumption. I’ve got the tiny house; how about the large lot of land to go with it? Maybe I should as an AI for help.

(Irony: I now tend to have Grammarly review and suggest edits to my writing. I don’t blindly accept its direction. As a writer, it is still young. But, I can already see that I’m becoming a bit antiquated by picking my own words, breaking rules to make a point, and trying to be more human in my writing. Welcome to the new world.)