The Transition Moonshot: AI From The Ground Floor

The AI transition is not only a technology story. It is a ground-floor story. TLDR: Connor MacIvor uses this View from the Ground Floor episode to propose a different kind of Moonshot for the AI era. Instead of only celebrating bigger models, faster automation, or breakthrough prizes, he asks what it would look like to make the transition itself the prize for the people who have to live through it. The episode is a practical challenge to leaders, builders, funders, and operators. If AI is going to reshape work, then the people closest to the work need more than speeches about discomfort. They need tools, training, accountability, measurement, and a real path to becoming more capable. Key points: The AI transition is already here for workers, small businesses, and operators. When people say the transition will be uncomfortable, the missing question is who carries that discomfort. AI should be treated like a tool that expands what capable people can do, not a replacement plan dressed up as progress. Moonshot thinking is useful when it creates clear goals, measurable outcomes, and public accountability. The ground-floor version of the AI Moonshot should reward successful transitions, not only technical breakthroughs. Read the companion article: https://connorwithhonor.com/blog/2026-281-transition-moonshot-ai-ground-floor/ YouTube release: AI with Honor. The public YouTube URL will be backfilled into the production receipt after the scheduled post goes live. Next step: bring one real workflow to https://BookWithHonor.com if you want help turning AI from a novelty into a working system with checks, boundaries, and a human owner still in the loop. Connor MacIvor records these episodes for operators who want AI to produce useful results without making people disposable. The point is to build systems that survive contact with real customers, real employees, real risk, and real decisions.

Youtube Channels:

Conner with Honor - real estate

Home Muscle - fat torching

From first responder to real estate expert, Connor with Honor brings honesty and integrity to your Santa Clarita home buying or selling journey. Subscribe to my YouTube channel for valuable tips, local market trends, and a glimpse into the Santa Clarita lifestyle.

Dive into Real Estate with Connor with Honor:
Santa Clarita's Trusted Realtor & Fitness Enthusiast

Real Estate:

Buying or selling in Santa Clarita? Connor with Honor, your local expert with over 2 decades of experience, guides you seamlessly through the process. Subscribe to his YouTube channel for insider market updates, expert advice, and a peek into the vibrant Santa Clarita lifestyle.

Fitness:

Ready to unlock your fitness potential? Join Connor's YouTube journey for inspiring workouts, healthy recipes, and motivational tips. Remember, a strong body fuels a strong mind and a successful life!

Podcast:

Dig deeper with Connor's podcast! Hear insightful interviews with industry experts, inspiring success stories, and targeted real estate advice specific to Santa Clarita.

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Good day, everyone. Let's talk about a view from the ground floor. Now we have been talking about the AI space, I guess, since the beginning. I remember back, it wasn't that long ago, 2000, 2001. Started reading some study research papers out of Stanford talking about artificial intelligence, of course, and that's everybody's exciting point, at least today. What we're watching is a lot of change, and it seems like people are pretty much in agreement that there's going to be this uncomfortable, uncomfortable moment, uh, time that we're going to be going through. And I did a video this morning that I think encapsulates this a little bit better. But I do want to talk about where AI is from where most of us are standing. Now, a lot of you have retirements perfect. A lot of uh my friends spent enough time at the police department to be able to get that, and that's fantastic. Uh I'm still working, and I will continue uh my drive and my quest, I think, forever, because this feels very important to me. Just like when you, if you're watching this, you're a police officer, you did sign up for a particular reason to protect and to serve. At least most of us did. There were some that kind of like that, that whole adrenaline rush, and they were complete adrenaline junkies. Yeah, I get that. That's that's part of that mix. And it's sometimes people that didn't originally start because of that really did enjoy that. But moving from there, looking at where we are today, again, now I'm thinking, yeah, there's nobody that's developing any kind of a good idea or theory behind trying to make this quote-unquote transition a little bit more smoother. So I've decided to start something called a moonshot. Moonshot is there's different organizations that develop these ideas where they basically they're shooting towards the moon and trying to fix and heal things, and there's been you know billions and millions of dollars, millions of dollars in prize money for people that have built out good moonshots, you know, solving a particular disease or trying to deplasticize the oceans and these sorts of things, trying to reduce carbon emissions, greenhouse effect. Okay, that's all good, but what about the people that are on the ground floor, which is most everybody watching looking up at the people running all the companies? What if we built our moonshot and had the people buy into it, figuring out the best way to make this quote unquote uncomfortable transition? Because that's all I'm seeing as of now. People are talking about, well, so they they they lavish you with all of the pleasantries. It's gonna be fantastic, it's gonna be amazing, everything's gonna be just lovely, perfect, and everybody's everything's gonna have its place, and artificial intelligence is going to have us all rise to an entirely different level in the world and in society. Great, great, great, great. But in when they say that, people from the labs now, and these are all with specific reasons, they're calling out and saying, well, you know, we need you to regulate us. That's probably there's other reasons for that besides them really being concerned that there's a safety issue. Some of them are pushing this forward because they, number one, don't want to be liable if something goes wrong, which this is that uncomfortableness that people talk about. It's going to be a little unpleasant. And then the other end of this thing is, of course, they want to create the moat. So no other, no other person or people that have made a decision to build out AI technology that could potentially could compete with OpenAI's Chat GPT or Anthropic's Claude or Microsoft's co-pilot or Musk's Grok or XAI's GROK or whatever they're calling that company now, super XAI superintelligence, I guess. But so nothing could compete. So if there is regulatory measures taken with the AI Frontier Labs, yeah, good luck somebody coming in and trying to start. It's like trying to start a bank. Good luck with starting a bank. And especially if you're in Europe trying to start a bank. I just don't know if that's even possible. But looking at the way that this technology is being built, the view from the ground floor looks a little bit different because they're telling us it's going to be uncomfortable. So who's telling us that it's going to be uncomfortable? People that are set. Now, these people, they might have some kind of a retirement, but it's not pension-based. It's most of the folks didn't do 30 years, 35 years as a cop or as a firefighter or as a nurse or as fill in the blank of whatever type of employment would get a CalPurz or some kind of other pension system that would pay them in. So that money isn't really theirs. That money is, well, yours. But that money, potentially, if you start paying a little bit more attention, might be used to buy into this technology. And as long as the technology keeps going, that's great. But looking at the historical record, I know history. Who wants to mess with history? Well, looking at the railroads, the venture capitalists, those are the people that were watching on Moonshots and these other endeavors, they have the right connections, they went to the right college, they were in the right dorm room with the right smart person, and you know, they have opportunities. So you give, you know, $10,000, then you walk out with $400 billion kind of an investment strategy with venture capitalists. But typically the walking in money, the seed money, the money that the pension funds don't get access to, the money that most of us don't get. I knew a cop, um last name of Armour, and John mentioned that he had an opportunity to buy into Jordash, Jordash jeans at some point. And John had a lot of interesting stories like that. This was one of them, and he thought it was a stupid idea. If if memory served this, I this story was 91, I heard this. But maybe. But venture capitalists, they don't think AI is a stupid idea at all. They're they're into it, they're going into AI, all in all together. Now, well, if you go back to the railroads, the people that paid for the railroads originally, they lost a lot. The people that came in after that, when it basically completely hit the ground floor, they're the ones that made the money. And this is kind of reminiscent in most markets where you have big tech or some kind of massive innovative idea. You have those early people in, they're able to cash out at a particular point. These stories exist, and they're able to walk out, and then other people go in and pick it up at the time, and that's when it collapses, usually. And then those other people, the guys that got out, now they go back in because it's pennies on the dollar and they create even more. I don't know if that is this, but they keep talking about it's going to be a little uncomfortable. Of course, job loss and not having food to eat, that would be very uncomfortable. So the people that are saying it's going to be a little uncomfortable, I'm curious if it's going to be uncomfortable for them. Yes, yes. Having to watch people starve, that's got to be horrible. But what if you're on the receiving end of being the one that's starving? So I propose this. So we have moonshots to be able to protect us from global warming. Moonshots for uh potentially curing disease and cancers and these sorts of things. Moonshots to paint a better picture of the AI future for everyone. That's another prize that they're awarding. Instead of movies like The Terminator, instead of movies like The Matrix coming out with movies that are very much supportive of an AI future about how it's going to love us all and take care of us and want the best for us, and so we don't fight with each other and we don't fight with ourselves, and we just live this better than awesome age and wonder of abundance. We have all of those things, which, okay, I'm all in. I I don't really believe you you have a couple crowds out there, you have the doomer end of it, right? They're saying that it's gonna wipe us all out. Then you have other people that think it's a bubble, thinks it's it's all nonsense and it's really not gonna go anywhere. I'm I'm not in either one of those really. AI for me used it as a hammer, used as a tool in my helping businesses and being completely upfront with them. I'm not there to replace your staff. And if that's your goal, then probably gonna need somebody else. The world, though, is looking at it for money. And if they can replace staff and save them money and bring in an AI that's able to do exactly what the staff can for, you know, almost free, then why should they not? Well, they should not, because it's gonna cause issues with the people that they're getting rid of, I think. My my opinion. But then the argument is, well, yeah, but if we keep these people, some smart cat's gonna come in from stage left and it's going to formulate an entire company that's that does have a head, but kind of employee less, except for AI. So AI will be doing all the job of everybody, and it's really gonna be without the head of the company. The the head will be there for potentially liability purposes, unless you're Argentina, and that one's already kind of moved on. But back to the idea, the moonshot for the transitional uncomfortableness that we are going to feel. You ask the people that are saying it's going to be uncomfortable, where are they in life? Who is it going to be uncomfortable for? Let's let's get that laid out. Who is this? And what do they have to lose when it gets uncomfortable? I would venture to say, besides having to watch people suffer, and I know I'm saying that very crass, but to them, I don't know if that's as meaningful as they themselves suffering, I don't think. But that's that's where the alignment is. So besides that, where where do they suffer? They're set, their generations are set because they were the early adopters into the technology. They've been right place, right time, right level of intelligence, right focus. They've built this empire. So instead of making moonshots the way that they are to develop movies that make AI look better, and that's great. I'm I'm all for that future. My gosh, wouldn't it be amazing if we all lived in a complete age of abundance without having to, we were safe, we were secure, we weren't being programmed in a way where now we're being controlled and mass-manipulated. Yeah, like that doesn't exist. But we were able to have our freedom, our free of thought, almost like that movie with Selma Hayek, right? Kind of a kind of a future like that. Something where we can all agree we have all we need, we have more than we need, and we're very happy in that world. Why not developing an idea to be able to have this transition be a moonshot itself with a prize award and everything else? How can we fix that? Because this isn't the scale of the revolutions before the industrial and so on. This is a much larger scale, and this has the potential to happen a lot faster, and the payoff could come a lot quicker, but the payoff is probably being targeted at the people that have all of the power, all of the control, and the venture capitalists that have gone in get a pension. Are they really going to take that money and go all in? And then what if that mechanism fails on the other end of it? And what if AI turns out to be somewhat not a flop, but basically gets devalued because of something that occurs, whatever that scenario would look like. Then all the pension systems go bust, and then the people that had income that they were depending on now they don't. And it's a question because I don't know. There's plenty of people talking about this in all spaces. And again, I'm not a doomer. I think this is fantastic. I want this to work. It's it's those words of it's going to be uncomfortable that I I can't grasp. What does that look like? Is it and is it one person? Yeah, out of six or seven billion, that that sucks for that person. But is it a quarter of the people, a tenth of the people? Then how do we fix that? If we do put in a moonshots transition and we do build this out so it makes the transition seamless with the speed of the way the technology is, because we can't fathom exponentials. We can't fathom how fast this is going to go. We can't fathom exponential growth and intelligence. Maybe that's the trick. But to bet on that without really having the answer, that because we can't see it, nobody can, only superintelligence can. And for them to try to explain it to us is like us trying to explain to a whole bunch of squirrels what our investment strategy is. The squirrels just want the knot, don't we all? But that's where this is. So those questions are: what do you have to lose if it happens? Who's going to be affected? And then what's the best way for us to develop not just a theory, because it's going to be uncomfortable, whatever that means. And I would guess uncomfortable is going to be there's going to be starving people, there's going to be people that aren't going to have a job. There's going to be people that are going to lose their homes, the homes that they again, yes, yes. Maybe they've overleveraged. Maybe they went and bought the BMW when they shouldn't have. Maybe they spent too much money on their wedding. Maybe they paid too much for their kids' college when college really isn't going to be a thing at some point in the future. Maybe all of that happened. Maybe they made bad decisions. Maybe they gambled it away. Maybe they they're addicted to drugs or alcohol or God knows what. But is that is that really the way we want to do this? We're going to start now scoring people economically viable. I know they already do that with the credit score system. And okay, yeah. So you have that. And of course, you don't want to spend to you don't want to lend money to people that are apparently irresponsible. But maybe there are reasons why somebody might look irresponsible, but really aren't irresponsible. Sometimes, I mean, my God, just walking through life, you slip and fall, and it wasn't because you did anything wrong, it just happened. So the moonshot is this. My proposal is this is we build out a moonshot, a strategy, an idea, an entire formulation of assets and ideas and techniques and on-purpose focus for the people, which would be everybody that's on the ground floor, like everybody like me, looking up. We develop a transition moonshot. What's going to end up happening? And try to keep everybody okay. They're laying off people. Now, they haven't been able to attribute this to mass AI layoffs, and maybe this is just maybe this is just pillow talk preparing us for maybe some eventual what would appear to us on the ground floor being horrible. The people that are at the top that are very, very excited about this technology because now they're going to be able to live for 50 lifetimes instead of just the one because they're building out the medical technology. There's so much here to unpack. Let's let's work on this together. I think we can. I'm Connor. If you have any more, uh if you have any ideas, please throw them in the comments if you're watching this later. And thank you very much for watching. Be well. We'll see you tomorrow.