Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” (Spanish philosopher George Santayana.)  A.I. is here and it isn’t going to magically go away. Still during the change is when fortunes are made. (Are you ready?)

Learn from the past or Rinse and Repeat! (And fortunes are made!)

Some of you are going to tell me I just don’t understand. You’ll point out that somehow this is “different.”  Some of you will just shake your head with me.

I’ve been watching the news and listening to the furor going on with ChatGPT.  I can’t help remembering similar situations I’ve lived through.

Pieces of Wood with tic marks – a Slide Rule. (And Fortunes are made.)

In the mid-sixties, I was taking engineering classes and even though calculators were becoming affordable, students had to use slide rules.  Not only were those machines “Cheating”, they would cause us to lose the ability to learn how to do math in our head and we wouldn’t be able to do complicated calculations with a pencil and a piece of paper.  Of course, reality won and my phone is a better calculator than existed back then.

Those Evil Things Called Word Processors.

Fast forward to the 80’s.  I was the Associate Director of Computer Services at the University of Central Florida. My job was to manage the staff manning the computer labs, help with computer data analysis, and teach the faculty and students how to use computers.  Students would use my department’s printers to print their English papers.  Why?  Almost all of the affordable printers were “dot matrix”.   You could see the dots that made up the letters with the naked eye.  The reason this was important to the students was that turning in a paper printed on a dot matrix printer resulted in getting an F on the paper.  

The dot matrix print was proof that the students had used word processing software.  Those dang programs had spell checkers and that was “CHEATING!”  Again we know how that turned out (I LOVE Grammarly).  

The Death of the Selectric Typewriters (And Fortunes are made.)

One more and I’ll let it go. While the students were told: “Do NOT use those evil things.”. the secretaries were being told: “You have to learn to use those things.” In the 80’s we were using ditto machines to make multiple copies of newsletters or class assignments and onion skin paper and carbon paper to type a paper once and have a few layers of the carbon paper and the onion skin paper to make “carbon copies.”  As micro-computers (they weren’t called personal computers back then) became more common, word processing software became part of day-to-day office life. (I’m with the tech guys who think that Word Star was the first generation of personal computers and Visicalc – an early spreadsheet program – was the second.)  For a couple of years, I held weekly classes teaching secretaries about Word Perfect (one of Word Star’s grandchildren). Almost every week someone would say: “But Dr. Pringle, I can type this paper much faster on my Selectric typewriter!”  And they were right!  After a while, I used this answer. I would pull out a 10-page document and say: “The boss just made these corrections and added these two paragraphs.  There is your Selectric and I have the first draft on this floppy disk.  Who do you think will get draft two done first?” Usually the light bulbs turned on.  I let one of them bring up the fact that I didn’t have to carefully proofread all of my 10 pages since it had already been done.  I’m sure there are Selectric and Daisywheel “typewriters” still in use, but they are very rare.  And fortunes were made.

The New Way the “Cheat”

Today I received an email from Esther Kiss.  Here is her quote:

​”Recently, the Associated Press (the news agency virtually all journalists subscribe to for info on breaking news) instructed its staff not to use AI-generated content for publication.

And now, CNN, Disney, The New York Times, Reuters, Bloomberg, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Insider, ABC News, Conde Nast, Hearst, Vox Media, and dozens of other major media companies have blocked access to ChatGPT’s bot so that it can’t crawl its archives.” 

Other articles talked about the TV scriptwriters’ strike as they see the handwriting on the wall and they don’t like what they see.

Some Things You Just Can’t Stop

Sorry guys, you can scream at a tsunami, but it won’t do any good.  Surely the past has shown us that!  (I can hear it!  “But Hale, this is different!”) I for one, don’t think it’s that different.

So What Has All This Got To Do With Us?

Well. one of the other things that has taken a radical downturn is “Job Security” and pensions you can count on.  Gone!  Just Gone with Vynal records, eight eight-tracks, flip phones and ….   

You really need to develop multiple streams of income and most if all of them should generate passive or residual income.

It’s all about picking the right program. Do that and fortunes are made.

First I’m going to ask you to take a deep breath and promise me not to say: “Hale, I don’t know anything about running a bank.” Come and learn about a system I believe is changing the banking industry.  We get to own a franchise and share in the profits that banks make without having to become financial wizards.  We help promote a Visa®️ bank card that literally doubles the buying power of the money you already have. A local bank does the heavy lifting of issuing and managing the cards and following federal regulations. This is the right time and you are in the right place.  All you need to do is take the right action.   Don’t wait.  There are some huge bonuses available to early adopters and these are going away in a few days.  (The basic cost is $25, so don’t think that this is way out of your budget!
Take a look today.  It can’t hurt!

Here is that link again! 

You CAN Own a Franchise!

Until the next time we look at Passive and Residual Income, Have a Great Day! Oh Hale Yes!