A revolutionary new technology was going to change the world. Investors couldn’t get enough of it. New companies appeared almost overnight. Enormous amounts of money were being spent to build the infrastructure needed to support it. People who had never invested before wanted in. Companies rushed to associate themselves with the new technology.
And anyone who questioned the enthusiasm risked being dismissed as someone who simply didn’t understand the future.

You know what I’m talking about. Except I’m not talking about AI.

I’m talking about Britain in the 1840s. The new technology was the railroad. And people were going crazy over it. To be fair, they had good reason to be excited. Railroads really were changing everything. Travel became faster. Goods could move more efficiently. Cities and towns that had once seemed far apart were suddenly connected in a way they had never been before.

This wasn’t some useless invention that people had talked themselves into believing was important. It was important. That was exactly what made the excitement so convincing. Once people saw what railroads could do, the next step seemed obvious. Build more.

Railway companies began appearing everywhere. New routes were proposed all over Britain. Investors poured money into them, often before anyone really knew whether those routes made economic sense. It became known as “Railway Mania”. Some people made fortunes. A lot of people lost them.

But the interesting part is that the railroads themselves were not the problem. The technology survived the mania. More than that, it fulfilled much of the promise people had seen in it. Railroads did change the world. What didn’t survive were all the assumptions investors had made about what every railroad company would be worth. That distinction is easy to miss. You can be right about a technology and still be very wrong about an investment.

We saw it again about 150 years later. The Internet arrived, and once again people correctly understood that something enormous was happening. Companies raced to get online. Investors raced even faster. During the dot-com era, simply being associated with the Internet could attract attention. Companies with little revenue and questionable business models were suddenly worth extraordinary amounts of money because investors believed they were buying a piece of the future. Then the bubble burst. A lot of those companies disappeared. The Internet didn’t. It became even more important than most people had imagined.

Which brings us to AI. I don’t think artificial intelligence is a fad. I use it. I see what it can already do. I think it is likely to change medicine, business, education, research and countless other areas in ways we probably haven’t fully grasped yet. But that is not the same thing as saying every company connected to AI is a good investment.

Those are two very different ideas. And that is where history becomes useful. It doesn’t tell us that AI is about to collapse. It doesn’t tell us which company is overpriced. It doesn’t even tell us whether today’s enthusiasm will eventually look foolish. What it does tell us is that people have a remarkable tendency to lose perspective when they become convinced they are looking at the future. We see other people making money and begin wondering whether we are being left behind. We become less concerned about price because we are more interested in possibility.

At some point, excitement can begin to feel like certainty. And certainty is dangerous when none of us actually knows what comes next.

That is why this verse caught my attention:

Do not toil to acquire wealth; be discerning enough to desist. When your eyes light on it, it is gone, for suddenly it sprouts wings,  flying like an eagle toward heaven.
Proverbs 23:4–5 (ESV)

I don’t read that as a warning against investing. I read it as a warning against becoming consumed by wealth. There is a difference. Investing can be wise. Planning for the future can be responsible. But the moment our eyes become fixed on getting richer, something changes. Greed becomes easier to justify. Envy starts sounding reasonable. Fear of missing out starts pretending to be wisdom.

Maybe AI will turn out to be every bit as revolutionary as its strongest supporters believe. Maybe today’s biggest AI companies will still dominate twenty years from now. Maybe some of the people buying them today will make enormous amounts of money. I don’t know. But I do know this.

The people caught up in Railway Mania thought they were looking at the future. They were. The people buying Internet stocks in the late 1990s thought they were looking at the future. They were too. Being right about the future did not make every decision they made along the way wise. That is the part worth remembering.

Perhaps this time really is different. 

But I doubt we are.

Love and trust the Lord; seek His will in your life.

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