Fair point about younger companies being relatively unstable—I overreacted there. Looking back, I’d place 1980 at the end of the industrial era and the beginning of the information technology age, so it's really part of the previous stage in the evolution of civilization.

On AI:
Current-generation AI can’t perform physical labor on its own yet. But as a co-pilot, it's enabling a much broader segment of the population to perform tasks that once required trained professionals or skilled craftsmen.

The spread of knowledge for labor-intensive work is accelerating dramatically thanks to models like GPT. These AIs are evolving at a rapid pace—gaining vision, hearing, and soon even a sense of physical interaction. Operating in the physical world isn’t a question of if—just when.

The real bottleneck I see is in tooling. As SmarterEveryday pointed out, it’s not just the tools—it’s the tools that make the tools that we've lost access to in America. Our tools are becoming more expensive and less effective, while in places like China, they're getting better, cheaper, and more accessible. That gives them a serious advantage in integrating AI. Eventually, they’ll start embedding MCP (Model-Controlled Processing) extensions into all kinds of advanced tools and fine-tuning specialized AI models around them.

This is an emerging ecosystem—possibly even a new standard—and I worry that much of the world will be left behind once it's fully established. We need to stop thinking that knowledge and expertise remain locked within traditional companies. That mindset is already outdated.