My neighbor bought his house in 1987 for $74,000.
He refinanced once.
He paid it off.
His property taxes are $1,800/year because of how long he's owned it.
The exact same house next door just sold for $710,000.
The 28-year-old who bought it pays $9,200/year in taxes.
And $4,100/month on the mortgage.
Same street.
Same house.
Completely different life.
We didn't just price people out of homes.
We priced them out of futures.
Jeff Bezos asked a room to imagine going back a hundred years.
When almost everyone was a farmer.
And telling those farmers that in 2018 there’d be a job called “massage therapist.”
Bezos: “They would not have believed you.”
Then a friend took it further.
Bezos: “Forget massage therapist, there are dog psychiatrists.”
He looked it up.
Bezos: “Sure enough, you can easily hire a psychiatrist for your dog.”
The room laughed.
The point under the laughter wasn’t funny at all.
Every time a major technology shift hits, we do the exact same thing.
We count the jobs it will destroy.
We never count the ones it will create.
Because we can’t.
They don’t have names yet.
The fear is always specific.
AI will replace accountants. AI will replace radiologists. AI will replace drivers.
The fear has job titles and timelines and projections.
The opportunity has none of those things.
Because you can’t name what doesn’t exist yet.
A farmer in 1920 could understand losing his job to a tractor.
He could not understand gaining a career as a social media strategist.
Not because he lacked intelligence.
Because the entire chain of inventions between his world and that job hadn’t been built yet.
Radio. Television. The internet. Smartphones. Social platforms. Creator economies.
Every single link in that chain had to exist before “social media strategist” could even be a sentence.
That’s where we are with AI right now.
Everyone is staring at the tractor.
Nobody can see the thing seven inventions away that doesn’t have a name yet.
The fear is loud because it fits inside language we already have.
The opportunity is silent because it doesn’t.
Every technological revolution in history created more jobs than it destroyed.
Every single one.
Not because anyone planned it.
Because human needs expand faster than machines can fill them.
We didn’t need massage therapists when we were breaking our backs on farms.
We needed them after machines freed our backs and stress replaced labor.
The demand didn’t disappear.
It migrated somewhere no one was looking.
That is exactly what’s happening right now.
The jobs AI creates won’t make sense to us yet.
They’ll sound as absurd as “dog psychiatrist” would’ve sounded to a farmer in 1920.
Until someone is running a $200 hourly practice with a six-month waitlist.
The entire conversation right now is about what we’re about to lose.
Nobody is talking about what we’re about to gain.
Because the gains don’t have vocabulary yet.
A hundred years from now, someone will stand on a stage and describe the jobs we couldn’t imagine today.
And the audience will laugh.
The same way we just did.
Jeff Bezos just told everyone to stop worrying about AI taking their jobs.
Then he said something most people completely missed.
Bezos: “I am not worried about this. I find that people, all of us, we are so unimaginative about what future jobs are going to look like.”
He’s not dismissing you. He’s challenging you.
Every generation has been terrible at predicting what comes next.
Nobody in 1995 was planning to become a YouTuber. Nobody in 2005 was dreaming of managing a Shopify brand from their kitchen table.
Those jobs didn’t exist until the world shifted and someone with imagination filled the gap.
That’s the pattern Bezos is pointing at.
The jobs that AI creates won’t look like anything we’d recognize today. They never do.
What changes is that the barrier between wanting to do something and actually doing it is about to collapse.
The person who always wanted to build but couldn’t code will build. The person who always wanted to create but couldn’t afford a studio will create.
AI doesn’t eliminate ambition. It removes the obstacles standing in front of it.
The people who thrive next won’t be the most technical. They’ll be the most imaginative. Bezos isn’t warning you. He’s telling you the door is wide open.
In 1951, scientist Adelbert Ames created the mind‑bending Ames Window.
This optical illusion features a rotating trapezoidal window that appears to oscillate back and forth instead of spinning continuously.
It’s so effective that, even when you understand how it works, you still can’t break the illusion.
Jordan Peterson hit hard:
“People with extreme high IQs are so much more productive than people on the lower end… they’re not even in the same universe.”
But here’s the part that matters most: IQ has nothing to do with morality. Being smarter doesn’t make you better. In fact, Peterson warns there’s a real “Luciferian temptation” that comes with high intelligence — the arrogant belief that your superior mind gives you the right to impose your systems and values on everyone else.
We all have the same intrinsic human value.
In a world that worships intelligence and status, remembering that smarts and goodness are completely separate traits is crucial.
I’ve seen brilliant people do ugly things and “average” people show incredible moral strength.
What do you think — does high intelligence actually make someone more prone to arrogance and moral blind spots, or is that just a stereotype?