Opportunity or Threat? Why I'm Doubling Down on AI

I've seen a ton of posts on socials lately. Warnings. Fear. AI is coming for your job. It's going to wreck the economy. It's going to burn down the environment. Every scroll is another reason to be afraid. And I've decided to do the opposite. I'm going to double down. I'm doubling down on learning. And I'm doubling down on what I call pebbling — more on that in a minute. But first I want to talk about the fear itself, because I think if we understand where it actually comes from, it stops being so scary. Here's my honest take: most of the anxiety swirling around AI isn't really about AI. It's about a pattern that has played out every single time a powerful technology stops being gated and becomes accessible to regular people. The thing nobody tells you about new technology New technology doesn't usually scare people while it's locked away in labs and corporations. It scares people the moment it lands in everyone's hands. Look at how AI actually traveled to get to you. It was born in a research lab in the 1950s — the term "artificial intelligence" was coined in 1956. For decades it stayed there, academic and theoretical. Then in the 1980s it grew up and went to work: "expert systems" started showing up inside real companies, and corporate AI groups formed at places like General Motors, DuPont, and American Express. AI was suddenly delivering business value — but it lived in the industrial world, behind the walls of big institutions. It wasn't yours. Then it quietly slipped into your everyday life without you ever really noticing. The spam filter that cleaned up your inbox. The Netflix recommendations nudging you toward your next show. Siri, and then Alexa sitting on your kitchen counter. By the 2000s and 2010s, AI was woven right into the substrate of the digital world. You were using it constantly — but only ever the slice of it that Google or Apple or Amazon decided to hand you, pointed at one task, on their terms. Still not yours. And then, in late 2022, the whole thing flipped. The power of AI stopped being aimed at one service you could only consume, and became something you could pick up and direct however you pleased. That's the real change. That's why ChatGPT racked up a hundred million users faster than almost any product in history. Not because AI was new — it was nearly seventy years old. Because for the first time, it was yours. That's the pattern. And we've lived through it before. Think about the cell phone. The first commercial handheld, the Motorola DynaTAC, hit the market in 1984 for nearly $4,000 — more than eleven thousand dollars in today's money. It weighed two and a half pounds and got thirty minutes of talk time. It was a status symbol. The lawyer had one. The doctor had one. The bag phone in the car said I am important enough to be reachable anywhere. Nobody panicked about cell phones then. They were a luxury for the few. The technology existed. It just wasn't yours. Then came the flip phones, and then the RAZR in 2004 — thin enough to slip in your pocket, and it sold a hundred and thirty million units. Somewhere in there the price came down, the bulk disappeared, and the cell phone stopped being an elite object and became a thing everyone carried. By the mid-2000s you were the odd one out if you didn't have one. And that's exactly when the hand-wringing started — about manners, about distraction, about what this was doing to us and our kids. The technology didn't become a cultural lightning rod when it was invented. It became one when it became ours. The internet is the same story. We talk about "the internet arriving" like it appeared overnight in the nineties. But people had been posting on bulletin boards for years before that, and big companies ran internal web systems long before the World Wide Web was a household phrase. The "wait, what is this going to do to society?" only arrived when it became accessible to ordinary people. So when you feel that flutter of anxiety, I want you to recognize it for what it often is: not proof that something terrible is happening, but the predictable hum that always shows up when something powerful stops being gated and becomes common. Who the fear is coming from — and which fears are real When I look at where the loudest AI fear is coming from, I see roughly three groups. And they're not all the same, so I don't want to lump them together. The first group struggles with change itself. Things are different now, and different is uncomfortable. What is the world going to look like? That's a human response, and it's nothing new. There's always a portion of people for whom "this isn't how we've always done it" is enough to set off alarm bells. The second group is more interesting, and it's the one worth understanding. It's the people whose unique value feels threatened. We love to use the word Luddite to mean someone who's anti-technology. But the actual Luddites weren't anti-technology — they were skilled weavers. Their whole livelihood, their specialness, came from a craft that took years to master. New mechanized looms threatened the very thing that made them valuable. So they smashed the machines. It wasn't ignorance. It was self-preservation. You can see the same dynamic today, and creatives are right in the middle of it. If you've spent years becoming an exceptional graphic designer, and suddenly a small-business owner who could never have afforded your rates is making their own "good enough" graphics, that is a genuine threat to a real business. I'm not going to pretend it isn't. But here's the fork in the road. You can treat that moment as a threat, or you can treat it as an opportunity. And history is brutally clear about which one pays off. The people who view a new technology as a threat dig in, smash the looms, and get left behind. The people who view it as an opportunity — who ask "how do I make this work for me, how do I pivot, what do I still uniquely offer?" — those are the ones who go farther, faster. Not because they were luckier. Because of the posture they chose. The third group has concerns we should take seriously. I'm not going to wave away the environmental worries, because they're real. Data centers take real power and real water, and a lot of the trouble comes from the fact that zoning boards and regulators simply didn't imagine this. Nobody pictured a data center going up across the street from their church or in the field behind their house. And that points at something true: regulation and bureaucracy don't have much imagination, and they're slow on the uptake. When technology moves this fast, the rules are always running to catch up. Those are legitimate things to wrestle with, and "be excited about AI" doesn't mean "pretend the costs don't exist." So when you stack it all up, the anxiety makes sense. It's moving fast — that "things are speeding up" feeling is real. It threatens people who built businesses on being uniquely skilled. And our guardrails — the regulation, the zoning, the norms — haven't caught up yet. Three real pressures, all at once. No wonder the timeline feels like a panic attack. But naming those three things is exactly what lets you stop drowning in them and make a clear-eyed choice. Why I'm not afraid for my own business Here's the part where I tell you why none of this keeps me up at night — and it comes back to that word I promised you. Pebbling. There's a species of penguin — the Adélie — and when a male is courting a mate, he searches for the perfect pebble and brings it to her. A small thing. A thing of value, chosen specifically for her. That's what we do for our clients. And it's the one thing AI cannot do. AI is not going to pick up the phone when my client is having a meltdown in an airport at 11 p.m. because their flight got cancelled and they don't know what to do. AI doesn't remember, the way I remember, that this client recently lost her mom and wants this trip to mean something. AI isn't holding the detail that my client is 6'6" and would give anything to never have his knees jammed into the seat in front of him — so I book him the bulkhead, every time, and he never even has to ask. AI didn't notice his anniversary is coming up so I can nudge him: hey, want to take your wife somewhere? Those pebbles are mine. They come from being a human who connects with other humans. That's the moat. That's the thing that doesn't get automated. The internet was supposed to kill travel agents, remember? And here we are. Because people don't actually want a transaction. They want to be known. So I'm not going to let AI overrule my judgment or plan my clients' trips for me. I'm going to let it do the administrative grind, fill in the gaps, and bridge the places I struggle — because like most of us, I'm essentially a one-person show, and help that costs a little per month beats hiring out or buying yet another single-use tool. AI gives me more time to pebble. It makes the human part of my business bigger, not smaller. The choice in front of you Every new technology eventually arrives at the same fork. Opportunity, or threat. It's the oldest question in that SWOT analysis you've probably done a dozen times — the O and the T. The weavers chose threat and smashed the looms. The people who learned the new machines built the next century. I'm choosing opportunity. I'm choosing to learn it, to stay in front of it, to make it work for me so I can do more of the irreplaceable human work only I can do. That's exactly why I'm building AI into the Summer Cohort — every level, every week. Not because it's going to replace you. Because the agents who understand it, who can differentiate themselves and show up for their clients, are the ones who are going to thrive. Come learn it with me. I think you'll be surprised at how much it can do for you — and how much more like yourself it lets you be.