In a word…No!
The joys of youth are that we get to make large mistakes because we, in theory, have so much time to subsequently correct them. I believe this theory. Now that I’m not in my youth (no comments please), I realize that time can allow for some mistakes to be inventoried and hopefully remedied.
Investments and business success have always been passions of mine. From an early age, I would follow the stock market, dabble in different enterprises like growing a newspaper route. One of these enterprises involved a real estate investment property that had 13 units and a restaurant near Drake University in Des Moines. The price seemed remarkably low for the amount of income that the property generated. In my mind, all I needed to do was keep the apartments rented, find a good handyman and I’d be off to the races.
Well, things did not go as planned.
It was incredibly difficult to find good tenants. The marginal ones that occasionally moved in would steal electricity, cause problems with tenants and engage in other nefarious activities. A few other nuances included collecting rent only in person, dealing with delinquent tenants, there was a new job opportunity for me in Fort Dodge, and I was about to become a father. To top it off, I drug my father into the whole deal with me.
So now, the question of whether AI could have saved me. If I had plugged into ChatGpt the specs for the building, the inspection report, the prior financials along with my forecasts it would likely have returned a neutral, agnostic reply (as only a machine can) that I would be an idiot to buy this dump. Well, sometimes in life we don’t make decisions based on facts or the opinions of others. Sometimes we just have to live it!
We lost money on this deal for sure. We also lost crazy amounts of time, anguish and stress. However, we learned about dealing with difficult people, how to fix a toilet, what to do if there’s a fire (the restaurant burned down), and what to do if a tenant goes to jail. It’s easy to laugh about this now, but my primary point is that AI will never understand what it is to be human. It can only reiterate what already is, not what could be, especially if it has never happened.
“Realizing that a popular backlash against their industry is underway, many AI leaders and AI boosters are actively looking for the answer to the question of ‘what will humans be useful for?’ So far, the most popular answer, advanced by AI folks like Alex Imas, is that humans will be useful simply because they’re human.” – Noah Smith
We are paying a lot of attention to AI at PrairieFire. We are also working hard to double down on the importance of our humanity as we share in all your life stories.
Have a great week!
