The Collection
AtaraxiaNine Essays on Artificial Intelligence and the Economy
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Ataraxia is an old Greek word for a particular kind of calm. The earned equanimity of someone who has looked hard at how things actually work and stopped being rattled by them. The Epicureans held that you reach it through understanding. Fear comes from confusion about how the world works, and the cure is to study the machine until the noise loses its grip.
I chose it as the title because the decade these essays describe will be the loudest in economic history. Every year of the buildout will bring a bubble call, a doom headline, a crash scare, and an arms-race panic, and most of them will sound convincing. The only way to hold conviction through that, in a portfolio or just in a worldview, is to understand the underlying machine well enough that volatility reads as weather instead of judgment. These nine essays are my attempt to earn that calm by studying the capex, the bottlenecks, the geopolitics, and the distribution fights until the conclusion stops being exciting and starts being obvious. Calm is not the absence of conviction. It is what conviction feels like once the work is done.
It is also where my fund, RAXIA, takes its name.