‘The Island Investor’ has a new home. Busy few months getting the new office set up in Cayman…A lot has changed but really exciting things coming.
A little bit Investing, A little bit personal
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I’ve always seen myself as a very positive person, so this nihilistic take is a departure from the norm for me.
‘Short term paranoid, long term optimist’ sums up my general outlook nicely.
When you spend every day in markets, you learn to tune out extremes. Everyone’s either screaming FIRE or proclaiming that we are on the edge of some glorious tech utopia.
Eventually, you figure out that the truth usually lives somewhere in the middle.
But lately, I’ve been struggling to stay in that middle.
Like a lot of people, I’ve been playing around with AI tools—building automations on Replit, building apps with Lovable.dev, testing ideas on the weekends.
Honestly, it’s been so much fun.
Sounds insane to describe back-and-forth discussions with AI as an exhilarating experience but that feeling of building something useful in a few hours—taking an idea in your head and turning it into an app that works is amazing.
It’s probably the closest I’ve come in my line of work to what I imagine a carpenter feels when they finish a piece of furniture. That feeling of accomplishment and satisfaction in making something out of nothing.
Last weekend, I built a draft automated workflow system that could potentially take multiple hours of onboarding down to under a minute.
This weekend, I put together a simple app that, frankly, works better for me than the financial planning software we get from a billion-dollar vendor.
I don’t say this as a subtle brag. Quite the opposite.
I’m just some idiot with an idea. I’m not a software engineer; I’m not an AI expert. I’m just a guy messing around with a new toy. And already, I’ve built things that replace real human work.
There are two sides to this.
As someone helping to build a small but growing business, this part is genuinely exciting. These tools are changing the economics of what’s possible. Tasks that used to be unprofitable or operationally too heavy to bother with—suddenly they’re doable. The old margin math gets rewritten. The economies of scale aren’t what they used to be, and for nimble operators, that’s a huge advantage.
First, it’s exciting. Then it hits you: the power of what you’ve just built is also the beginning of something darker.
It reminds me of that scene in The Big Short, when Charlie and Jamie are celebrating their short position in the hotel lobby in Vegas, and Brad Pitt’s character berates them:
“You just bet against the American economy. If we’re right, people lose homes. People lose jobs. People lose retirement savings. People lose pensions. You know what I hate about fucking banking? It reduces people to numbers.”
For me, this is what it feels like building with AI in 2025. The thrill of creation. The creeping dread of implication.
Because this time, there’s no limit to who’s affected. We used to say: specialize, skill up, find a niche, learn to code. But now? AI is writing its own code. It’s generating legal arguments, diagnosing illnesses, producing music, and designing buildings. It’s not just the low-skill jobs on the line anymore.
There are no limits, there are no protections. Nobody is immune.
As someone who hopes to have kids and grandkids one day. It’s a grim rabbit hole to peep down.
There’s a nihilistic edge to all this that’s hard to shake. Yes, cutting labor costs might boost margins. But to what end?
To create a world where every company is just a room full of people doing everything they can not to disturb the robots as the computers keep the profits rolling in?
I appreciate that industry disruption and job displacement has always been a feature throughout human advancement. Jobs become obsolete and the technology that makes those jobs obsolete creates room for new jobs you never could have imagined.
When electricity came onboard, we feared what would happen the lamplighters who lost their jobs as a result.
When Excel was introduced, there were concerns that it would eliminate the need for accountants. Contrary to that belief, the demand for accountants has grown, as Excel has enhanced their capabilities, allowing them to handle more complex tasks efficiently.
The internet, electricity, railroads. Progress and destruction go hand in hand.
This has happened time and time again. Maybe it will happen again.
But this current change due to AI is happening at a speed we have never experienced before.
Entire industries will be obsolete in an instant.
Yes, perhaps AI will be a step in the right direction over the long term, but I believe the short-to-medium term displacement effect could be severe.
What is the actual price of this kind of progress?
We keep telling ourselves that humans will just move up the value chain.
But AI is eating the world. Is there anywhere left to move?
We’ll have free time to do the things we love” … Spare me.
Tell an unemployed person to just ‘enjoy their free time’ and see how that goes for you.
We’re willfully skipping toward a future that strips an entire generation of purpose, meaning, and dignity—all in the name of marginal efficiency.
And we’re not just allowing it. We’re being lured in like kids being offered sweets outside a white van.
My original stance since the first rollout of ChatGPT has been ‘AI won’t replace you, but someone using AI better than you might’. And while I still believe this is directionally correct, I can’t help but feel that this is all advancing at a pace that people still seem to completely underappreciate.
It’s already happening.
The Shopify CEO, Tobi Lütke, announced recently in a company-wide letter (snippet below) that any new hire would not happen until it was proven that the work could not be done by an AI agent.
The job your kid would have got… Unlucky – it went to a robot instead.
Shopify are one of the largest companies in the world. You think they are alone here? This is very clearly the direction of travel for every business, and this approach will ramp-up quicker than you can imagine.
Maybe I am completely wrong here, and the AI promised land will lead us to a new utopian state.
Perhaps constant AI expansion will lead to cool new professions I can’t even begin to comprehend. I truly hope so.
I just don’t see it yet.
That got a bit darker than I had intended when I first started writing but apparently, I am more passionate about this than I first thought.
I’m aware that this whole piece may come across as the epitome of ‘old man yelling at clouds’. I don’t want it to be.
To be clear, the future is AI – so much of the exciting things I do at the moment are possible because of AI.
For people who like to build new things, it feels like the cusp of a revolution. It opens an entire universe of opportunities that were impossible to imagine just two years ago.
I just can’t help but feel that these opportunities are at the expense of someone else.
Anywho, just me throwing some thoughts on paper.
I hope I’m completely wrong.
In a bid to not just leave this piece hanging on an apocalyptic note, I think it’s best to finish off by viewing all this through an investment lens.
In the words of Josh Brown:
‘For the last fifty years, we’ve invested for retirement. For the last two or three years, we might be investing for a whole other reason. What price is too high to pay for a company’s stock if the company spends every waking minute trying to replace you?’
At this point, there’s only one thing left to do:
Just own the damn robots.
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Mike 👋
