[apexalpha]

This seems wrong, though?

For cars the inventor is (Mercedes) Benz, the people who first mass produced it was Ford. Both seem like good investments.

PC: Who is this early mover you talk about? I guess not Apple in your mind, since that would've been a fantastic investment. Hard to think of any better.

Plus, there are hundreds if not thousands of companies along the way you could've invested in that were swallowed up by the bigger fish. That's still a good investment since you either get a good exit or shares in the bigger fish.

[harry8]

Survivor bias is massive here, watch out for it.

Osborne beat apple to personal computing. Facebook did not exist during the dotcom boom. So very many early car companies went broke. "But if you'd only got ford it would have been sweet as." But they weren't first. Panhard et Levassor in 1889, ford in 1901 sayeth wikipedia.[1] So now you're waiting and picking winners in the sector which is very much harder without the time machine to see what worked out in the end.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_automobile#Eras...

[apexalpha]

Of course this is survivor bias, and of course many companies went bust.

But that's what investing is. Even in a mature sector of the economy companies can go bust. That doesn't mean it's always a bad idea to invest in new and upcoming technologies.

[harry8]

>Whether you believe AI is going to be massively transformative to the modern economy on a scale with cars or personal computing is actually not sufficient to start investing in the 'sector'

Note that "not sufficient" does not mean something else and particularly not "never do it." You've still got to pick winners if you want to succeed and that is likely a difficult task if history is any guide. Good luck.

[skybrian]

This is hindsight bias. You know the names of the ones history remembers.