How do you view the glass — half full or half empty? This question aptly captures the dual nature of sentiment today. On one hand, our standard of living is among the highest in history, fuelled by technological advances, improved quality of life, substantial and growing wealth and increased life expectancy.
When the Dow Jones Industrial Average (Dow) crossed a new high of 40,000 in May, it achieved a milestone that appeared implausible given recent popular sentiment. Just two years earlier, central banks were still on the path of aggressively hiking rates to curb inflation.
It has been 45 years since BusinessWeek declared the “Death of Equities,” warning that rampant inflation was “destroying the stock market” and “to regard the death of equities as a near-permanent condition.”1 These dramatic prognostications haven’t subsided over time, likely because negative news is more appealing. When one news website decided to report exclusively good news for a day, it lost two-thirds of its readership.2 Our brains are hardwired to react more strongly to negative information.
It has been said that millennials — those born from 1980 to 1994 — were the first generation worse off than their parents financially. Skyrocketing housing prices, a higher cost of education and a challenging economy, among others, were to blame. And while things didn’t look so great for the millennials a decade ago, recent studies suggest a different story.
“A new technology bids to transform the human cognitive process…redefine human knowledge, accelerate changes in the fabric of our reality and reorganize society.” These are the words of Henry Kissinger on the age of artificial intelligence (AI) and the potential impact of ChatGPT — the AI chatbox that has taken the world by storm. Indeed, the evolution of AI is a reminder that change can come thick and fast.
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