Obligatory disclaimer: this is not financial advice. I’m not a financial professional. I’m a person who has been on this planet for over five decades, watched a few economic cycles complete their arcs, and has opinions.

Here’s what everyone seems to be missing about AI: it’s not a research tool or an email proofreader. It’s an enabler. A force multiplier. The great equalizer of skillsets — which is either exciting or terrifying depending on which side of the skill gap you happen to be standing on.

The limiting factor used to be execution. Could you code? Could you design? Could you write? Not anymore. What matters now is vision. Pure, unadulterated vision. Which, it turns out, is the one thing you can’t download.

I haven’t written code since I was a teenager. That used to bother me. There were projects I wanted to build, ideas that never got off the ground because coding is hard and life had other plans. But now I’m doing all of it. Thousands of lines of code, every day — not because I spent thirty years re-honing my programming skills, but because I have an assistant. Its name is Artificial Intelligence. All I have to do is describe where we’re going and nudge it back toward the center when it drifts toward the guardrails. AI built the car. AI is driving. I’m just plotting the course.

I’ve put a meaningful chunk of my retirement savings into AI ETFs. Diversification with conviction, if you want to call it something. Not financial advice — that part is important — but I’ve watched enough cycles to know when something is different. The personal computer was big. The internet was bigger. This is bigger than both of those combined, and it’s coming faster.

The current administration is a distraction. There will always be that battle between our worse and better angels, and right now the worse angels have the podium. But this technology doesn’t care who’s in the White House. It’s coming anyway. Over the long term, most people want good things — for themselves, for their kids, for each other. That’s where the steering wheel gets nudged, eventually.

One more thing, and then I’ll stop: I’m a Trekkie. Over fifty years, I’ve watched the show’s technology become reality at a pace that would have seemed delusional in 1966. The communicator became the cell phone. The ship’s computer became Alexa, then something much better. The tricorder became the smartphone. Flat panel displays are just displays now. Star Trek wasn’t a prediction — it was a vision. And the show’s best insight wasn’t the technology. It was the idea that once technology stops being the limiting factor, what’s left is the human spirit and whatever values we’ve managed to hold onto.

AI has that potential. It might even help us solve the actual existential problems — climate change, resource scarcity, education at scale — the ones that matter more than quarterly earnings. I’m invested in it. I’m learning it. I want to help push it along.

To paraphrase Timbuk3: our future is so bright, we need to wear shades. And yes — there will be no kings.