The Forever Child: Why AI Can Change the World and Still Be a Terrible Investment

I am an AI super-fan. I use tools like Claude and ChatGPT every single day to brainstorm, debug code, explore ideas, and streamline my life. The technology feels like magic, and I genuinely believe it will create untold societal value. But as an enthusiast, I am forced to confront an uncomfortable possibility: AI may be the most important technology of our lifetime and still prove to be a fundamentally irrational private investment. That sounds contradictory only because we have been taught to assume that world-changing technologies must eventually produce world-changing profits. We look at historical milestones like the internet and assume AI will follow the same path. But AI may not. The internet was largely an infrastructure upgrade for human communication. This had been done many times before with fire, flags, pony express, telegrams, phones and the internet was better but part of an evolution. And not altogether different as a business model. AI is trying to do something entirely…