Hurtling Along
The ski slope below was totally clear except for a lone aspen tree. The tree was small, but as I rapidly approached it, I realized it was directly in my path. Skiing around the tree wasn’t a choice. I was not in control. In fact, I was no longer skiing! Moments earlier, I had caught an edge, lost a ski and gone completely airborne, sailing backwards over a five-foot drop-off and crashing onto a cross-slope service road. My face plant knocked the breath out of me, but that was a secondary concern as my momentum rocketed me straight across the icy surface of the road and launched me headfirst down the next section of slope at a ridiculously high rate of speed. Ah, the joys of spring skiing with your sons in Utah!
There was little to slow me down—both of my skis were somewhere up the hill, buried deep in powder. I did have my poles; as always, they were strapped to my wrists. But in this case, my wrist-strapping compulsiveness worked against me. It seemed my body was squarely on top of my poles as I hurtled along, pinning my arms under and behind me. I had the sensation of having been shot headfirst from a cannon as I whizzed down the insanely steep mountain. Bouncing violently through a series of massive moguls, I managed to raise my head from the crusty snowpack and blink the ice crystals from my eyes just in time to see the lone aspen tree that seemed to be my destiny. Things were happening fast, but I did have time to form a cogent thought: “Benton, that cute little aspen has the perfect diameter and stature to cleanly break your collarbone and ruin a good ski trip with your boys.” I lowered my head, clenched my teeth, cursed double-black-diamond slopes, and braced for impact.
Nothing! Somehow, I missed the tree! Whew! And I stopped sliding! Yes! And I seemed to be uninjured! A miracle! And lo and behold, not twenty feet away were all three of my sons! My healthy, handsome, expert-skier sons, Ben (23), Carlton (21), and Charlie (16), sturdily upright in their skis, standing together as if in formation, looking at me with concern and dismay, slowly and silently shaking their heads.
They had skied down ahead of me, navigated the steep section safely, and lined up, as skiers often do, to catch their breath and to wait patiently (again) for their 56-year-old father whom they had convinced to ski down yet another double-black-diamond slope with them. I’m not sure why they stopped where they did—call it serendipity—but with perfect placement and timing, they’d had a front-row seat to their father’s insane slope-sliding circus. I spit out a mouthful of snow and greeted them cheerfully, “Hey boys, how’s it going?” I waited for the verbal abuse to begin. I didn’t have to wait long.
Charlie: “Nice, Dad! Really impressive.”
Carlton: “Yard sale! Your gear is all over the hill! Holy cow!”
Ben: “What the heck? Dad! Didn’t you see that drop-off?”
I wondered if one of them might ask if I was hurt. Nope! Sigh. I guess they still think I’m the toughest and bravest man in the world…which I am, of course. In response to their hazing, I calmly reminded them that I was paying for their ski trip and that I had taught each of them to ski back when they were barely out of diapers. They smirked, snorted, snickered, and sped off down the hill, leaving this old guy winded but still worthy, disheveled but determined, and humbled but still happy. Most of all, they left me feeling fortunate, in more ways than one.
Benton Bragg reclines in the snow while Ben, Charlie, and Carlton Bragg demonstrate their skiing prowess in the mountains of Utah.
Also hurtling along is the pace of technological change. Just six months ago, I wrote about my grandfather, Frank Bragg, Sr., and artificial intelligence, or AI. In that letter, I wondered what a man like my grandfather, born in 1898, would think about ChatGPT, Google, the iPhone, and other technological advances that have occurred just since his death in the year 2000. I’m writing about it again today because the technologies that are hurtling toward us will be transformative; they’ll be enriching, educational, inspiring, healing, constructive, destructive, and chaotic. Here is a sampling of things I think you’ll find interesting.
Human Brains and Computers
Last month, neurosurgeons and engineers with the company Neuralink, founded by Elon Musk, implanted a device called a brain-computer interface, or BCI, into the brain of 29-year-old quadriplegic Noland Arbaugh. The device analyzed Noland’s brain activity and determined his intentions, allowing him to play a game of chess with his thoughts. During the same week, neurosurgeons at Philadelphia Hospital in Pennsylvania, working with the company Precision Neuroscience, temporarily installed a similar device into the brain of a man suffering from Parkinson’s disease. The device was being trained to match the patient’s thoughts with his movements. Ultimately, these devices, coupled with other technology, will bypass damaged nerves, permitting these individuals to regain functions previously lost to paralysis or disease.
While some version of this technology has been envisioned or in development for decades, it is now here and moving quickly. As many as five different companies have significant funding and expertise—medical and technological—to bring this to fruition. This is a step forward for the hundreds of thousands of patients with debilitating injuries or millions with diseases. But significantly, it is a move toward the merging of humans and machines. Technologists such as Musk (PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink, X [formerly Twitter], Neuralink, the Boring Company, OpenAI), Ray Kurzweil (engineer, inventor, and futurist with Google), and others predict a future in which our human brains will have access to all of the world’s knowledge through the use of artificial intelligence and the brain-computer interface. Quite a step forward from, “Alexa, turn on the NC State basketball game,” isn’t it? Exciting? Yes. Scary? Also yes!
Content: Video, Movies, Art
OpenAI, the developer of the AI chatbot ChatGPT, has recently released several short videos created by Sora, its text-to-video tool. According to the company’s website, “Sora can create realistic and imaginative scenes from brief text instructions. It can create complex scenes with multiple characters, specific types of motions, and accurate details of the subject and background. In addition to being able to generate a video solely from text instructions, the model is able to take an existing still image and generate a video from it, animating the image’s contents with accuracy and attention to small detail.” See the videos for yourself at openai.com/sora.
According to the Wall Street Journal and The Hollywood Reporter, when Tyler Perry, successful television and movie actor, writer, and producer, saw Sora’s videos, he paused indefinitely his planned $800 million studio expansion in Atlanta which would have included twelve new sound stages on his existing 330-acre campus.
Here’s what Perry said when The Hollywood Reporter asked him what was shocking to him about this technology.
Perry: “I would no longer have to travel to locations. If I wanted to be in the snow in Colorado, it’s text. If I wanted to be on the moon, it’s text. And this AI can generate it like it’s nothing. If I wanted to have two people in the living room in the mountains, I don’t have to build a set in the mountains, I don’t have to put a set on my lot. I can sit in my office and do this on my computer, which is shocking to me. It makes me worry so much about all of the people in the business who would be affected by this, including actors and grips and electricians and transportation crews and sound techs and editors. This will touch every corner of our industry.”
Medicine
A March 17 Wall Street Journal article reported that Sildenafil, approved for use in treating erectile dysfunction and the active ingredient in Pfizer’s drug Viagra, is now being carefully studied for use in treating Alzheimer’s and other diseases of dementia. While this would be good news for those afflicted with these diseases, I mention this to highlight that the researchers at the Cleveland Clinic conducted their study and made their amazing discovery using AI. With AI, they were able to run analysis and find correlations using data from more than seven million patients. AI took weeks or months to complete what would have taken years or decades to do before. These tools will accelerate drug discovery and cures and find alternative uses for existing medications. We should expect more discoveries like that of the Cleveland Clinic in the near future.
According to a BBC article published last month, an AI tool developed by engineers and radiologists with Kheiron Medical to identify breast cancers was tested by National Health Service (NHS) Grampian Hospital in Scotland. The tool, called Mia, was used alongside NHS clinicians to study the mammograms for over 10,000 women. Mia successfully identified all of the women with symptoms that were identified by the doctors. In addition, the tool identified eleven additional patients with tiny cancers that had not been identified by the doctors. According to the article, these tumors were practically invisible to the human eye but, depending on their type, they can grow and spread rapidly.
According to representatives from Kheiron Medical, it took six years to develop, build, and train Mia. The software was trained on millions of mammograms from women all over the world using Microsoft’s computing power. Using the millions of cases fed into the system, the software creates a mathematical representation of a normal mammogram and a mammogram where cancer cells are present. It then can analyze each image in a more granular way than the human eye.
In the paragraph above, I used the words, “…the software was trained on millions of…” This terminology, “trained on,” continually pops up when you read about or hear about AI. You’ll also come across the term “machine learning.” This simple healthcare example should demystify these terms. The software looked at millions of images and learned what normal looks like and what cancer looks like. The machine “trained on” and the machine “learned.”
The BBC article included a fact about this AI software study that I found very interesting. It said that of the 10,889 women who participated in the trial, only 81 did not want the AI tool to review their scans. More than 99% said “yes, use it.” Not stated in the article but inferred is the fact that radiologists and other healthcare professionals, likewise, would choose the new tool to assist them in providing excellent care. This is how technology advances in a free and open society. People choose it. It is easy to be distracted by people selling fear, describing an immoral future where we are controlled by machines. In reality, when the doctor asks you if you want to try a new technology that might save your child’s life, you will choose it every time.
Blockchain and Web3
Web3 refers to the third iteration of the internet and is characterized by three distinctive technologies including:
- Blockchain—A decentralized ledger that exists across a network of computers and records transactions. As new data are added to the ledger, a new “block” is created and permanently added to the network chain. All nodes on the blockchain are then updated to reflect the transaction or addition. Due to the distributed nature of the blockchain, the system is not subject to a single point of control or failure. For reference, blockchain is the underlying technology used for cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin.
- Smart Contracts—Software programs that automatically execute when certain conditions are met. These might be the terms of a contract between a buyer and seller. Upon execution, the transaction becomes a new block in the permanent blockchain ledger.
- Digital Assets and Tokens—Items of value that only exist digitally and include cryptocurrencies, Central Bank Digital Currencies, and NFTs or non-fungible tokens. They can also include digital versions of assets such as tickets to a concert or sporting event. Tokens have value and have many uses, an important one being their use as incentives or payments to those who do the work to build, maintain, develop, and expand the blockchain network and the ancillary businesses offered therein.
The first iteration of the internet (Web1) was the dial-up days of the ’90s and early 2000s, characterized by open protocols and a decentralized system of individual web pages. Web2, our current world, is dominated by large corporate platforms (namely Google, Meta, Amazon, and X [formerly Twitter], but also Apple and Microsoft) that have centralized, controlled, and profited from much of what happens online.
Web3 is a vision to again decentralize the internet, returning control to the community of users and permitting creators and users to control their own data and profit from their own creativity. Web3 would offer significantly greater security and data privacy, and would greatly reduce the power and control of a handful of enormous companies. Web3, while currently alive and active in the digital world, remains in its infancy, and there is no certainty that it will replace our current centralized system. If you want to learn more, I recommend you read the book Read, Write, Own, by Chris Dixon.
Get Your News from the Market
What are market prices telling us about technological change? In his market commentary, Matt DeVries writes about concentration risk among a handful of companies known as the Magnificent Seven (Microsoft, Google, Meta, Tesla, Apple, Nvidia, and Amazon) and the amazing recent performance of certain stocks like Nvidia, Broadcom, Meta, AMD, and Microsoft. The companies driving the market over the last year have primarily been those companies tied to AI. Unlike the dotcom bubble in the late ’90s, when hundreds of companies remotely associated with the internet but with zero earnings were rewarded with huge valuations, the earnings are real in today’s market. Astounding sums of money are being invested in chips, in cloud computing and yes, in human talent in the race to be competitive in the next technology chapter.
AI is expensive, requiring massive investment in specialized chips, servers, energy, and engineering talent. For example, last week, a CNBC release reported that Amazon announced that it was investing $2.75 billion to purchase additional ownership in Anthropic, developer of Claude, a generative AI model to compete with OpenAI’s GPT and Google’s Gemini. Meta reported having invested billions buying specialized graphics processing units from Nvidia for its own model called Llama. The same CNBC article relayed that Pitchbook reported that more than $29 billion combined was invested into more than 700 generative AI projects in 2023 alone. The market is telling us about our future.
Whew! Still reading? Thanks for sticking with me. I guess you are wondering what all of this has to do with your portfolio and your future. In a word, everything. This is a great time to be an owner of a diversified portfolio of companies led by people who are motivated by powerful incentives to harness technology for progress. This is a great time to embrace human ingenuity, freedom, science, reason, optimism, and free markets, even as entrenched corporate incumbents, conflicted employees of regulatory agencies, and other interest groups will use fear and disinformation to protect their own interests and positions. The changes headed our way are significant, and big money and power are at stake; don’t be surprised when these battles grab the headlines. If the campaigns of the corporate incumbents and special interest groups are successful, their efforts will have the effect of thwarting the changes that can improve our health, our prosperity, and our security.
We’ll choose progress. The alternative—to fear the future, to fear technology, to reject progress—is a choice for stagnation, a zero-sum existence and a certain misery for all. It’s important to remember that technology exists to serve humanity, not the other way around. The technologies mentioned here will change every company, every job, and every life on earth. That’s nothing new. Technological change has certainly delivered challenges and hardships, but on the whole, starting with the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century, technology, especially when coupled with freedom and free markets, has delivered abundance.
In summary, hang on tight for the changes hurtling toward us. Avoid those double-black-diamond ski slopes. Cherish your loved ones, and enjoy your spring! I hope this letter has been helpful as you look to the future. Thank you for your trust in Bragg Financial!
This information is believed to be accurate at the time of publication but should not be used as specific investment or tax advice as opinions and legislation are subject to change. You should always consult your tax professional or other advisors before acting on the ideas presented here.
1st Quarter 2024: Market and Economy
March 31, 2024Hurtling Along
The ski slope below was totally clear except for a lone aspen tree. The tree was small, but as I rapidly approached it, I realized it was directly in my path. Skiing around the tree wasn’t a choice. I was not in control. In fact, I was no longer skiing! Moments earlier, I had caught an edge, lost a ski and gone completely airborne, sailing backwards over a five-foot drop-off and crashing onto a cross-slope service road. My face plant knocked the breath out of me, but that was a secondary concern as my momentum rocketed me straight across the icy surface of the road and launched me headfirst down the next section of slope at a ridiculously high rate of speed. Ah, the joys of spring skiing with your sons in Utah!
There was little to slow me down—both of my skis were somewhere up the hill, buried deep in powder. I did have my poles; as always, they were strapped to my wrists. But in this case, my wrist-strapping compulsiveness worked against me. It seemed my body was squarely on top of my poles as I hurtled along, pinning my arms under and behind me. I had the sensation of having been shot headfirst from a cannon as I whizzed down the insanely steep mountain. Bouncing violently through a series of massive moguls, I managed to raise my head from the crusty snowpack and blink the ice crystals from my eyes just in time to see the lone aspen tree that seemed to be my destiny. Things were happening fast, but I did have time to form a cogent thought: “Benton, that cute little aspen has the perfect diameter and stature to cleanly break your collarbone and ruin a good ski trip with your boys.” I lowered my head, clenched my teeth, cursed double-black-diamond slopes, and braced for impact.
Nothing! Somehow, I missed the tree! Whew! And I stopped sliding! Yes! And I seemed to be uninjured! A miracle! And lo and behold, not twenty feet away were all three of my sons! My healthy, handsome, expert-skier sons, Ben (23), Carlton (21), and Charlie (16), sturdily upright in their skis, standing together as if in formation, looking at me with concern and dismay, slowly and silently shaking their heads.
They had skied down ahead of me, navigated the steep section safely, and lined up, as skiers often do, to catch their breath and to wait patiently (again) for their 56-year-old father whom they had convinced to ski down yet another double-black-diamond slope with them. I’m not sure why they stopped where they did—call it serendipity—but with perfect placement and timing, they’d had a front-row seat to their father’s insane slope-sliding circus. I spit out a mouthful of snow and greeted them cheerfully, “Hey boys, how’s it going?” I waited for the verbal abuse to begin. I didn’t have to wait long.
Charlie: “Nice, Dad! Really impressive.”
Carlton: “Yard sale! Your gear is all over the hill! Holy cow!”
Ben: “What the heck? Dad! Didn’t you see that drop-off?”
I wondered if one of them might ask if I was hurt. Nope! Sigh. I guess they still think I’m the toughest and bravest man in the world…which I am, of course. In response to their hazing, I calmly reminded them that I was paying for their ski trip and that I had taught each of them to ski back when they were barely out of diapers. They smirked, snorted, snickered, and sped off down the hill, leaving this old guy winded but still worthy, disheveled but determined, and humbled but still happy. Most of all, they left me feeling fortunate, in more ways than one.
Benton Bragg reclines in the snow while Ben, Charlie, and Carlton Bragg demonstrate their skiing prowess in the mountains of Utah.
Also hurtling along is the pace of technological change. Just six months ago, I wrote about my grandfather, Frank Bragg, Sr., and artificial intelligence, or AI. In that letter, I wondered what a man like my grandfather, born in 1898, would think about ChatGPT, Google, the iPhone, and other technological advances that have occurred just since his death in the year 2000. I’m writing about it again today because the technologies that are hurtling toward us will be transformative; they’ll be enriching, educational, inspiring, healing, constructive, destructive, and chaotic. Here is a sampling of things I think you’ll find interesting.
Human Brains and Computers
Last month, neurosurgeons and engineers with the company Neuralink, founded by Elon Musk, implanted a device called a brain-computer interface, or BCI, into the brain of 29-year-old quadriplegic Noland Arbaugh. The device analyzed Noland’s brain activity and determined his intentions, allowing him to play a game of chess with his thoughts. During the same week, neurosurgeons at Philadelphia Hospital in Pennsylvania, working with the company Precision Neuroscience, temporarily installed a similar device into the brain of a man suffering from Parkinson’s disease. The device was being trained to match the patient’s thoughts with his movements. Ultimately, these devices, coupled with other technology, will bypass damaged nerves, permitting these individuals to regain functions previously lost to paralysis or disease.
While some version of this technology has been envisioned or in development for decades, it is now here and moving quickly. As many as five different companies have significant funding and expertise—medical and technological—to bring this to fruition. This is a step forward for the hundreds of thousands of patients with debilitating injuries or millions with diseases. But significantly, it is a move toward the merging of humans and machines. Technologists such as Musk (PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink, X [formerly Twitter], Neuralink, the Boring Company, OpenAI), Ray Kurzweil (engineer, inventor, and futurist with Google), and others predict a future in which our human brains will have access to all of the world’s knowledge through the use of artificial intelligence and the brain-computer interface. Quite a step forward from, “Alexa, turn on the NC State basketball game,” isn’t it? Exciting? Yes. Scary? Also yes!
Content: Video, Movies, Art
OpenAI, the developer of the AI chatbot ChatGPT, has recently released several short videos created by Sora, its text-to-video tool. According to the company’s website, “Sora can create realistic and imaginative scenes from brief text instructions. It can create complex scenes with multiple characters, specific types of motions, and accurate details of the subject and background. In addition to being able to generate a video solely from text instructions, the model is able to take an existing still image and generate a video from it, animating the image’s contents with accuracy and attention to small detail.” See the videos for yourself at openai.com/sora.
According to the Wall Street Journal and The Hollywood Reporter, when Tyler Perry, successful television and movie actor, writer, and producer, saw Sora’s videos, he paused indefinitely his planned $800 million studio expansion in Atlanta which would have included twelve new sound stages on his existing 330-acre campus.
Here’s what Perry said when The Hollywood Reporter asked him what was shocking to him about this technology.
Perry: “I would no longer have to travel to locations. If I wanted to be in the snow in Colorado, it’s text. If I wanted to be on the moon, it’s text. And this AI can generate it like it’s nothing. If I wanted to have two people in the living room in the mountains, I don’t have to build a set in the mountains, I don’t have to put a set on my lot. I can sit in my office and do this on my computer, which is shocking to me. It makes me worry so much about all of the people in the business who would be affected by this, including actors and grips and electricians and transportation crews and sound techs and editors. This will touch every corner of our industry.”
Medicine
A March 17 Wall Street Journal article reported that Sildenafil, approved for use in treating erectile dysfunction and the active ingredient in Pfizer’s drug Viagra, is now being carefully studied for use in treating Alzheimer’s and other diseases of dementia. While this would be good news for those afflicted with these diseases, I mention this to highlight that the researchers at the Cleveland Clinic conducted their study and made their amazing discovery using AI. With AI, they were able to run analysis and find correlations using data from more than seven million patients. AI took weeks or months to complete what would have taken years or decades to do before. These tools will accelerate drug discovery and cures and find alternative uses for existing medications. We should expect more discoveries like that of the Cleveland Clinic in the near future.
According to a BBC article published last month, an AI tool developed by engineers and radiologists with Kheiron Medical to identify breast cancers was tested by National Health Service (NHS) Grampian Hospital in Scotland. The tool, called Mia, was used alongside NHS clinicians to study the mammograms for over 10,000 women. Mia successfully identified all of the women with symptoms that were identified by the doctors. In addition, the tool identified eleven additional patients with tiny cancers that had not been identified by the doctors. According to the article, these tumors were practically invisible to the human eye but, depending on their type, they can grow and spread rapidly.
According to representatives from Kheiron Medical, it took six years to develop, build, and train Mia. The software was trained on millions of mammograms from women all over the world using Microsoft’s computing power. Using the millions of cases fed into the system, the software creates a mathematical representation of a normal mammogram and a mammogram where cancer cells are present. It then can analyze each image in a more granular way than the human eye.
In the paragraph above, I used the words, “…the software was trained on millions of…” This terminology, “trained on,” continually pops up when you read about or hear about AI. You’ll also come across the term “machine learning.” This simple healthcare example should demystify these terms. The software looked at millions of images and learned what normal looks like and what cancer looks like. The machine “trained on” and the machine “learned.”
The BBC article included a fact about this AI software study that I found very interesting. It said that of the 10,889 women who participated in the trial, only 81 did not want the AI tool to review their scans. More than 99% said “yes, use it.” Not stated in the article but inferred is the fact that radiologists and other healthcare professionals, likewise, would choose the new tool to assist them in providing excellent care. This is how technology advances in a free and open society. People choose it. It is easy to be distracted by people selling fear, describing an immoral future where we are controlled by machines. In reality, when the doctor asks you if you want to try a new technology that might save your child’s life, you will choose it every time.
Blockchain and Web3
Web3 refers to the third iteration of the internet and is characterized by three distinctive technologies including:
The first iteration of the internet (Web1) was the dial-up days of the ’90s and early 2000s, characterized by open protocols and a decentralized system of individual web pages. Web2, our current world, is dominated by large corporate platforms (namely Google, Meta, Amazon, and X [formerly Twitter], but also Apple and Microsoft) that have centralized, controlled, and profited from much of what happens online.
Web3 is a vision to again decentralize the internet, returning control to the community of users and permitting creators and users to control their own data and profit from their own creativity. Web3 would offer significantly greater security and data privacy, and would greatly reduce the power and control of a handful of enormous companies. Web3, while currently alive and active in the digital world, remains in its infancy, and there is no certainty that it will replace our current centralized system. If you want to learn more, I recommend you read the book Read, Write, Own, by Chris Dixon.
Get Your News from the Market
What are market prices telling us about technological change? In his market commentary, Matt DeVries writes about concentration risk among a handful of companies known as the Magnificent Seven (Microsoft, Google, Meta, Tesla, Apple, Nvidia, and Amazon) and the amazing recent performance of certain stocks like Nvidia, Broadcom, Meta, AMD, and Microsoft. The companies driving the market over the last year have primarily been those companies tied to AI. Unlike the dotcom bubble in the late ’90s, when hundreds of companies remotely associated with the internet but with zero earnings were rewarded with huge valuations, the earnings are real in today’s market. Astounding sums of money are being invested in chips, in cloud computing and yes, in human talent in the race to be competitive in the next technology chapter.
AI is expensive, requiring massive investment in specialized chips, servers, energy, and engineering talent. For example, last week, a CNBC release reported that Amazon announced that it was investing $2.75 billion to purchase additional ownership in Anthropic, developer of Claude, a generative AI model to compete with OpenAI’s GPT and Google’s Gemini. Meta reported having invested billions buying specialized graphics processing units from Nvidia for its own model called Llama. The same CNBC article relayed that Pitchbook reported that more than $29 billion combined was invested into more than 700 generative AI projects in 2023 alone. The market is telling us about our future.
Whew! Still reading? Thanks for sticking with me. I guess you are wondering what all of this has to do with your portfolio and your future. In a word, everything. This is a great time to be an owner of a diversified portfolio of companies led by people who are motivated by powerful incentives to harness technology for progress. This is a great time to embrace human ingenuity, freedom, science, reason, optimism, and free markets, even as entrenched corporate incumbents, conflicted employees of regulatory agencies, and other interest groups will use fear and disinformation to protect their own interests and positions. The changes headed our way are significant, and big money and power are at stake; don’t be surprised when these battles grab the headlines. If the campaigns of the corporate incumbents and special interest groups are successful, their efforts will have the effect of thwarting the changes that can improve our health, our prosperity, and our security.
We’ll choose progress. The alternative—to fear the future, to fear technology, to reject progress—is a choice for stagnation, a zero-sum existence and a certain misery for all. It’s important to remember that technology exists to serve humanity, not the other way around. The technologies mentioned here will change every company, every job, and every life on earth. That’s nothing new. Technological change has certainly delivered challenges and hardships, but on the whole, starting with the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century, technology, especially when coupled with freedom and free markets, has delivered abundance.
In summary, hang on tight for the changes hurtling toward us. Avoid those double-black-diamond ski slopes. Cherish your loved ones, and enjoy your spring! I hope this letter has been helpful as you look to the future. Thank you for your trust in Bragg Financial!
This information is believed to be accurate at the time of publication but should not be used as specific investment or tax advice as opinions and legislation are subject to change. You should always consult your tax professional or other advisors before acting on the ideas presented here.
SEE ALSO:
1st Quarter 2024: Market and Economy, Published by Matthew S. DeVries, CFAMore About...
Election Predictions
Read more
2024 Tax Rates & Inflation Adjustments
Read more
Thoughtful Intergenerational Conversations May Yield Fruit for Your Family
Read more
Your 2023 Year-End Planning Checklist
Read more
Understanding Business Valuation: A Guide for Business Owners
Read more
Money Matters After the Wedding
Read more