The Kool-Aid Man’s Entrance
I don’t know about you, but my mouth, teeth, and lips are cherry-red from drinking the AI kool-aid. From my point of view, the dawn of AI marks a revolution that easily matches the emergence of the industrial age and the most recent information age. The breakthrough of the artificial intelligence age is just about as subtle as the Kool-Aid Man barreling through the nearest wall. Which is to say, it is not subtle at all.
Unfortunately, my sense is that many of us have formed our understanding of AI by logging into ChatGPT and using it as a glorified Google search or curious chatbot. We entered various questions and were amazed to get mostly sensible long-form answers. And of course, if you’re like my wife, you’ve been punked by various AI images and videos that have cats elegantly jumping off diving boards into pools of water. “Babe, come look at this! Look at how they trained this cat to dive! Unbelievable!”
But I’m here to tell you that if you think AI is a personal chatbot or funny image creator, you haven’t considered the half of it. I subscribe to Tesla full self-driving, and my AI car drove me round-trip from Dana Point to San Francisco. I have used AI to mock up web-based applications for use at work, and I don’t know a lick of code. I had it comb through four years of correspondence with a particular individual to create a full transcript and summary analysis. All of this is just scratching the proverbial surface…
And so it is with great personal interest that I observe the different utopian and dystopian visions people are having in this moment. What else would we expect from a truly disruptive technology that represents “creative destruction?” I do not strictly subscribe to eastern mysticism, but if there was ever a test case for Yin and Yang, this might be it. Creation and Destruction, living right alongside each other – in dynamic circular tension.
Crazy Eyes and Conspiracy Theories
We see ample evidence of competing euphoric and apoplectic emotions in the way markets, politicians, and conspiracy theorists are behaving. Surging markets have not only benefited from higher corporate earnings, but they have also soared on a tailwind of AI-generated capital expenditures and expectations. Sure, markets are historically expensive and hitting successive all-time highs (during a war in the Middle East, no less), but we’re going to build data centers in space, man! Space, do you hear me?! (Imagine I am shaking you by the shoulders with crazy eyes). Elon says we’re all going to have robots!
Meanwhile, certain concerned politicians are bemoaning the frightening potential for lost jobs/wages and negative ecological impacts of the new energy demands this technology creates. Conspiracy theorists are convinced that data centers are going to be used to launch a full-blown surveillance police state. Just this week a bill was just introduced to stop more data center construction… Because we obviously need our ever-wise politicians to be more economically responsible and forward-looking! God help us.
Back to First Principles
So what should we make of this AI-fueled shift in human epochs? Should we embrace it? Oppose it? Escape it and move to a cabin in the woods? Invest in it? Take short positions? Anticipate being laid off? Wait for a universal income check? Is this the end of the world as we know it? As one of my favorite authors, Francis Schaeffer asked, “How should we then live?”
I love these kinds of problem sets because they force us to come back to first principles and disciplined thinking. First, let’s attempt to hone in on the core challenge/opportunity we are wrestling with. Second, we will attempt to define some terms and categories. Finally, we will reflect on ways of putting it all together.
The Jetsons or The Terminator?
If you’re familiar with the Jetsons cartoon and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator movie franchise, then you are familiar with the fundamental challenge/opportunity posed by AI. Are we on the cusp of a tech-filled future with cute robots doing chores and fulfilling our needs while we live in unending abundance? Or will a sci-fi “singularity” occur when machines become sentient and self-aware entities competing for scarce resources? George Jetson in a flying car or Sarah Connor in the desperate armed resistance? Where is our story headed?
You may object that these cartoonish caricatures oversimplify matters. And while I understand that sentiment, I think they are valid frames of reference given the kinds of rhetoric floating around. Consider a few notable quotes from thought-leaders who are in-the-know:
Jetsons Perspective:
“The importance of AI is real, and while I hesitate to use the word transformational, it is. The pace of adoption will likely be far faster than prior technological transformations, like electricity or the internet… AI will affect virtually every function, application, and process in the company. And in the long run, it will have a huge positive impact on productivity… I believe that 30 years from now… your kids are probably working three and a half days a week. They’ll probably live to 100… AI’s gonna cure cancers. It’s gonna come up with better materials. It’ll stop a lot of car crashes. Life will be better.” – Jamie Dimon, CEO of J.P Morgan Chase
“AI/robotics will produce goods & services far in excess of the increase in the money supply… Universal HIGH INCOME via checks issued by the Federal government is the best way to deal with unemployment caused by AI… My prediction is that work will be optional. It’ll be like playing sports or a video game… If you want to work, it’s the same way you can go to the store and just buy some vegetables, or you can grow vegetables in your backyard.” – Elon Musk
Terminator Perspective:
“The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race. It would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever-increasing rate. Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete and would be superseded… Success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history. Unfortunately, it might also be the last, unless we learn how to avoid the risks.” – Stephen Hawking, physicist
“AI will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there’ll be great companies.” – Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI
Defining Terms
I want to proudly say that I DO NOT use AI to assist me in my writing. I love writing and am not willing to give up work that I love doing. However, I think it would be very fair for AI to define itself for us. So the rest of this section will be written by AI to give us an enhanced understanding of what AI is.
ChatGPT Response:
Artificial intelligence is the broad name we give to machines that can perform tasks we normally associate with human intelligence: recognizing patterns, interpreting language, making predictions, solving problems, creating images or text, and adapting to new information. At its simplest, AI is not a little person inside the machine. It is a system trained on data to detect relationships, assign probabilities, and produce useful outputs. Where older software followed explicit instructions — “if this, then that” — modern AI often learns from examples. It studies millions or billions of patterns and gradually develops a mathematical sense of what tends to go with what.
Under the hood, much of today’s AI runs on neural networks: layered webs of artificial “nodes” connected by numerical weights. These weights are adjusted during training until the system becomes better at predicting the right answer, the next word, the likely image, the useful recommendation, or the best next move. A large language model, for example, does not “know” English the way a person does. It has learned the statistical structure of language so deeply that it can generate fluent explanations, arguments, poems, code, and conversation. Its answers emerge from pattern recognition at an enormous scale.
That is why AI can feel uncanny. It can imitate reasoning, personality, creativity, humor, and even moral concern. But imitation is not the same thing as inner life. Current AI systems do not appear to possess consciousness, desire, self-awareness, pain, love, worship, regret, or moral agency. They can speak *about* these things because human beings have written endlessly about them, and AI has absorbed the patterns. But the model is not known to experience the meaning behind the words it generates.
The more serious question is not whether today’s AI is secretly sentient, but whether increasingly powerful systems may someday blur the line between simulation and something closer to agency. As AI gains memory, autonomy, sensory input, and the ability to act in the world, the philosophical stakes will rise. For now, AI is best understood as a powerful engine of pattern recognition and generation — not a mind, but a mirror and amplifier of human knowledge, creativity, error, and ambition.
*Source: Self-created, for Illustrative Purposes Only (May 21, 2026)
Ok – it’s me, Brett. I’m back – in the flesh. I think that was a very helpful exercise, and hopefully it doesn’t require more commentary at the moment. One of the big takeaways for me is that AI is not “one thing.” It is the emergence of many mathematical “weightings” / pattern-recognition models applied to different disciplines.
But now for the even bigger question. Namely, “what is a human being?” This is Anthropology 101 stuff, and we’re going to briefly consider the possibilities.
Anthropology 101: The Really Important Issue
For the sake of argument, I’m going to submit that there are two basic views concerning the composition of a human being. If you hold to a strictly atheist/agnostic materialist worldview, then human consciousness is ultimately reducible to biological processes and neural computation. But if you are more generically spiritual or specifically religious, you believe man is a bipartite being composed of physical (material) and meta-physical (soul/spirit) “stuff.”
This fundamental split in worldviews is absolutely vital to grasp for this exercise. I am not a materialist atheist/agnostic in my worldview. But if I were, this AI moment would be deeply troubling and unsettling. Think about it. If man’s sentience is simply a matter of a wet neural network embedded in a biological brain, then there is little difference between a human and a robot or AI agent with a neural network embedded on NVidia chips. One is a biological machine, and one is a non-biological machine… and it looks like the non-biological machine has a lot more firepower. Survival-of-the-fittest and all that Darwinian jazz. You probably should get in touch with your inner Sarah Connor, my friend.
But if, like me, your cosmological worldview is a bit more “thick” than one-dimensional materialism, man is not a mere bio-machine operating with the illusion of personal-moral agency. In the historically Christian West (which is my view), humans are understood to uniquely bear the “Imago Dei,” or image of God. In the language of the Declaration of Independence, we are “endowed” by “our Creator” with certain unalienable rights and gifts.
This means a lot of things, but one of the most important is that our personal agency and relationship to this world does not boil down to mathematical probabilities or biophysics of brain synapses. Man is not just another animal alongside other animals. He is not just an evolved wet-machine that gave birth to a more highly evolved robot-machine. Man is actually a central and distinct actor on the stage of the universe. Man is created with a purpose to fulfill.
Admittedly, believing that man bears the imago Dei doesn’t necessarily solve our Jetsons vs Terminator problem. But I think it sheds significant light. Because at the bare minimum, it draws a firm line between true sentience and moral agency and a material non-imago Dei entity that mirrors sentience and moral agency.
But is that a philosophical distinction without a difference? If a robot kills me because it believes I am depriving it of energy resources or posing an existential threat, isn’t that still murder? We don’t believe dogs have moral agency, but if they kill a human, we put them down. What is the significance of these metaphysical moral categories if human flourishing is threatened by quasi-sentient machines?
The Imprinting Machine: Dogs, Gardens, and AI
Let’s stick with our beloved dogs for a second. I’m no longer a pet-owner myself, but I do realize that there is something “almost” human about dogs. They seem to exhibit and even read emotions. They can defend, comfort, and be playful with their human counterparts. They can be trained and bred to be incredibly helpful or very dangerous.
Bear with me.
Here’s the funny thing about the Imago Dei in humans. It is not static. As God imprints His image onto us, so we, in turn, imprint our image onto the world around us. That is by the Creator’s design and is the operating program of this world as we know it. This imprinting from humans onto the world includes dogs and other animals – they reflect man’s image, as it were. They don’t directly bear God’s image, but they DO bear our image. Our pets image us. Our homes, our lawns, our cars, our workplaces – they bear our thumbprints. Because that is core to what it means to be human. We are pressing our image into the world around us (#full-time work) – for good or ill. Human transformation and deformation of our world is an inescapable feature of being human.
AI is therefore not a replacement or proxy for humans. But it is a kind of mirror and analogy. It is going to bear our thumbprints and our image, and it will amplify our transformational activity. And because that is true, it will magnify what is good and what is bad. Productivity gains will accelerate, and pornography will become more potent. Healing arts will be enhanced, and war machines will become more lethal. George Jetson and the Terminator are going to live in the same world at the same time. Yin and Yang.
How Should We Then Live-Invest?
But what does this mean at a practical level? How do these first principles and paradigms guide our investing and our decisions?
- Investing in AI: Most importantly, understand this – if you’re invested in the broad markets, you are ALREADY heavily invested in AI. Not only are cap-weighted indices like the S&P 500 heavily impacted by big-tech, but you can bet your bottom dollar that every major corporation and startup in the world is integrating AI into their business model and platform. Everything from cheeseburgers to gasoline to your shoes is going to be impacted in some way by AI. Don’t feel like you have to chase an AI-specific trade. It is already ubiquitous. If you own the market or any major/minor players in the market, you’re invested in AI.
- FOMO – Picking Winners & Losers: One of the hallmarks of market euphoria is that people believe everyone will be a winner. And while I hope our TOM readers are more sophisticated than that, there is an adjacent temptation of FOMO (fear of missing out). Make no mistake, some people will make the right bets. But rest assured that we probably do not have the faintest inkling of the biggest AI ideas and implementations that lie ahead. If you handle your portfolio like you’re going to play roulette in Vegas, you’re playing with fire.
- Beware of circularity: David Bahnsen has opined on this at length, but one of the dynamics in play is that there is financial circularity in many AI enterprises. Think of a big chipmaker with sky-high valuations funding small businesses that turn around and order chips from that chipmaker. There’s more than a little bit of that going on now. And it may work out just fine for the big chip makers. Time will tell. The point is to look under the hood of the car. Don’t take price action alone as the signal that you should own or continue to own something.
- Jiu Jitsu Principle: I’ve been doing Brazilian Jiu Jitsu for over three years and have been biding my time to work it into a blog post. It’s kind of like asking a vegan why they’re vegan. Watch out, people. Here’s the principle. Jiu-Jitsu is interesting because it encourages you to move with your opponent’s energy. You don’t meet force with force. If they push, you pull. You go with it. My point is – I don’t think abstaining and resisting like the Amish is the way to go. AI is a technology that is inevitably going to impact most things in life. So if you have a career, I suggest you keep up with it at some level. Learn how to use it well. Amplify your results and your fruitfulness. At its best, AI is one of the most amazing tools humans have created.
- Engage the Culture: I’m going to close out with some wisdom from the novel, Jurassic Park. Believe it or not, it is not just a fun story about dinosaurs. The original book by Michael Crichton was actually a social commentary about the perils of technological ability that is untethered from strong ethics. Just because we CAN create dinosaurs doesn’t mean we SHOULD. The point is that if we do not continue to contend for a VIRTUOUS and free society, we will lose both. If our culture becomes unmoored from basic morality, the consequences for AI and for all of us will be grim.
I don’t believe AI is a bogeyman hiding under the bed. Instead, it is and will be a reflection of all of us. Of me and you.
I’m starting with the man in the mirror
I’m asking him to change his ways
And no message could have been any clearer
If you wanna make the world a better place
Take a look at yourself and then make a change
~ Michael Jackson
Brett Bonecutter
Private Wealth Advisor
Trevor Cummings
PWA Group Director, Partner
Blaine Carver
Private Wealth Advisor
*This piece and content herein was created by using generative AI. HighTower Advisors, LLC does not use AI-generated information when making investment decisions, providing investment advice to its clients or in predicting changes in the stock market’s direction or in the price of a security. Exercise caution when using AI-generated information as it might rely on data that is inaccurate, incomplete, or misleading and may lead the investor to make risky investment decisions. For example, AI-generated information may be based on false or outdated information about financial, political, or other news events or derived from false or misleading information that was disseminated as an attempt to manipulate a stock’s price (either positively or negatively). Even when based on accurate input, information resulting from AI can be faulty or false. Depending on how it is presented, AI-generated information, particularly conversations with chatbots, could lead an investor to make misinformed, emotionally driven or impulsive decisions which can be a risky approach to investing.
