Ed van der Walt

More on Substack: open.substack.com/pub/thepenandl…

AI Is Smart, Not Wise (…and what that means for those in the business of selling advice) The daffodils are early this year. Walking two scruffy standard poodles through the Kent countryside, they line the edges of the footpath in unruly clusters. A labradoodle further up the path has broken free and is tearing across a meadow with the joy of a creature that has never read a headline about the UK labour market. There's an AI-generated elephant on the walk. ChatGPT, Claude, and the next wave of specialist algorithms are aimed at every profession where expertise commands a fee. People are worried their hard-won skills will be rendered obsolete by machines that do what they do faster and cheaper. I understand the fear. I work with these tools daily. But history offers a more nuanced lesson. My first real job was in a one-hour photo lab. Those barely exist now. Kodak, at its peak employing 145,000 people, filed for bankruptcy. But photography was simultaneously democratised. Everyone had a camera in their pocket. And the professionals who brought judgment, composition, and taste to the craft found themselves more valued than ever. The technology eliminated film processing. It did not eliminate the eye. A mechanical saw makes cutting trees down faster. But someone still decides which trees to cut. Making the blade sharper does not promote it to the decision layer. No algorithm has ever sat with a family and understood that the widow's risk tolerance is not what the questionnaire says it is. AI will handle the plumbing so humans can concentrate on the architecture. That is not a threat. It is a liberation. The world will turn faster. It always has done. I have my chips squarely on the table. I recently bet my career on one of these industries, leaving a senior role at Bloomberg to take an entry-level position in a private bank for a fraction of the salary. People thought I was mad. Some were polite enough not to say so. An AI could write these words. Perhaps it could even write them well. But it would not mean them. It could not mean them. It does not have chips on the table. It has no poodles, no walks to take, no career to risk. AI is the brilliant graduate, book-smart and fast, who can quote every theory but has never sat across a kitchen table from someone whose pension just halved. Humans like empathy that's real. Felt. Shared. Not intoned. Lab-grown diamonds are chemically flawless, but they don't make it into engagement rings. What people value, in diamonds and in advice, is authenticity. The knowledge that something real was at stake. That it was forged under pressure. The labradoodle has been retrieved. Its owner, a woman in a DryRobe poncho, waves apologetically. The dog is unrepentant, mud-streaked, tail still going. My two regal poodles maintain their air of dignified superiority. Only somewhat undermined by the fact that one of them is drinking from a muddy puddle. And the daffodils, I can report, are doing just fine.

Taking the rest of the year off!

Little known fact. It takes three times longer to do Christmas shopping online than to go to a shop.

If you're not Tom Selleck, you can't pull off a moustache. Sorry, not sorry.

@Ch2Christo I do. And I will again. I've got one in the hopper on gold now, actually.

@EdVanDerWalt Do you miss the days writing about gold. Certainly everyone is super interested lately. Of course that last french (few words I know) was a joke

Just going to use this website as a place to brag about my Duolingo score going forward.

@Ch2Christo Sacré bleue !

@EdVanDerWalt Merde 🤣

Congratulations, if you can read this, you are real, and hence one of a small minority.

@kleaweb3 Only because you (a) appear to have a sense of humour and (b) seem real.

@EdVanDerWalt lol I followed you, I wanted to ask if you'd follow me back 😹 Thanks for the joke

Dear Americans. I'm happy y'all are celebrating Thanksgiving and all. But please come back to Twitter, LinkedIn and Substack. Engagement is way down. We need you.

Confused. Thought in 2025 we say: "May I meet you?"

@kleaweb3 Connect to what? I don't have a cable.

@EdVanDerWalt Hey can we connect ty 🤗🤗🤗

More on substack. substack.com/home/post/p-18…

So you passed the CFA, CAIA or FRM? Congratulations! The bad news? Now the real work begins… substack.com/home/post/p-18…

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

@grok @Wataga29 @AVGirl4Life @grok translate

If you keep drinking the trick will come to you.

Everyone's freaking out over TPUs and Deepseek. Five years from now we're going to train LLMs on home pc hardware. That's just how Moore's Law works.