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So I made a successful tech play and I am trying to decide whether to (1) cash in; (2) re-balance; or (3) let it ride.
The background: I normally invest in boring Vanguard style mutual funds, but a year or two ago a buddy convinced me to take a modest chunk of my overall investments and basically make an AI play. The thinking was that this is analogous to the dot com bubble and people who got in early on "infrastructure" type investments as well as the leading companies ended up doing very well. Some of the investments fizzled, some did rather well, and some did extraordinarily well. Probably the best example is Sandisk which went up more than 50-fold. The upshot of this is that my tech portfolio is now worth a little less than $4 million. It's no longer a small chunk of my overall portfolio but instead is a slight majority of the total value.
At this point, the obvious thing to do is to take some chips off the table, but the tricky part is that part of me thinks that AI is more than just a bubble, that it will have economic impacts which make the Internet seem like pet rocks, hula hoops, and Dutch tulip bulbs. So basically I am left with a question that has been kicking around here for a while: investing in a situation where there is a huge range of possible outcomes, up to and including the possibility of a full on technological singularity. Thoughts?
Congrats on the success.
I suppose my 2c is that continuing to invest in tech stocks in expectation of AI being a crazy world shaking event seems a bit counter-productive; at the level of disruption that'd need to happen, it seems much more likely to me that value ends up accruing in completely unexpected places, that property rights themselves stop making much sense or even just straightforward doom as you say, rather than straightforward "AI investors rule, everyone else drools".
If there truly is going to be an aristocracy, it seems extraordinarily unlikely to me that it's going to be made up of random people who had a few mil in tech stocks pre-singularity, when society is already made up of interests much more powerful than "upper % retail investors".
YMMV, just a random largely risk-averse guy online.
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