Surviving in an AI age
My girlfriend and I are in the process of buying a house just north of San Francisco. Over the last six weeks, I’ve spent 500 hours immersing myself in real estate.
I’ve scoured the property, met with County officials, received bids from seven different contractors and conducted inspections with engineers, architects, roofers, plumbers, electricians, and pool servicemen.
This recent immersion into real estate isn’t only a personal rabbit hole; it has highlighted a larger problem that we’re all about to face. When rapidly accelerating technology meets slow-moving bureaucracy, the inevitable result is chaos. We urgently need a better way forward.
Accelerated learning through AI
The single most important tool for my learning about real estate has been AI – ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and others. I use ChatGPT “Deep Research” a dozen times a day to learn about random factors like the cost of rebuilding a private lane or how sound travels across marsh wetlands.
Of course, AI occasionally hallucinates. But even if 5% of what it provides is incorrect, these tools have exponentially accelerated my learning.
Despite my rapid learning and progress, all that speed hits a wall when confronted with real estate bureaucracy. Throughout this process, I’ve been confronted by an antiquated, bureaucratic, and slow-moving system.
BWOP – Building without a permit
One of the many challenges with our current property is that more than half of the house was built without a permit – BWOP. It’s as entertaining to say as it is painful to remedy!
To remedy BWOP, you either have to pay fines, retroactively obtain permits, and bring everything up to code, or demolish all of the work that was done! Unfortunately, this makes sense: without consequences, nobody would bother with permits.
Even more confusing is the fact that county officials can't tell me exactly what qualifies for a BWOP. When you own a home, a certain amount of “exploratory work” is fine. But past a certain point, home improvements require a permit – and extensive fines if you’re caught out.
How much home improvement can be conducted without a permit? Nobody can tell me.
The rate of change is accelerating
It is onerous and time-consuming to navigate the complex bureaucracy even to answer simple questions. Meanwhile, my AI agents allow me to research more and play out more scenarios than if I had a full-time PhD-trained research assistant doing the same work.
As the authors of Responsive.org wrote back in 2015, “The rate of change continues to accelerate” and “The future is increasingly hard to predict.”
What do we get when we mix the bureaucracy of generations of humans overlapping their systems with technological innovation that is progressing more rapidly than thought? Uncertainty, and chaos. This is echoed on a global scale.
Just this week, the Trump Administration applied sweeping tariffs on every US trading partner, the stock and bond market plummeted, and days later the tariffs were reversed.
Tilting at windmills
When faced with rigid bureaucracy, most of us react with frustration – for the most part ineffectively. We complain that the “system is out to get us” or that real estate policy “just shouldn’t be this way.”
And while I agree that many of these systems we need are broken, this “tilting at windmills” – purposelessly attacking something that a single person can’t change – is worse than useless.
It generates more anger and frustration.
What we need to do, instead, is work where we can. In real estate, that means accelerating my learning and communication as much as technology allows, while still talking to humans and slowly working my way through the tangled bureaucracy until I can understand what will be required.
The way forward
The collision between AI acceleration and human inertia isn’t going away. So we have a choice: proactively design responsive systems, or continue stumbling through chaos. And this friction isn’t unique to real estate. It is symptomatic of a much broader issue affecting industries and institutions everywhere.
My only advice is to consider where in your life or business you can blend technology with the patient navigation of bureaucracy.
Instead of fighting unwinnable battles, our solutions need to be incremental. Learn faster, then communicate clearly, persistently, and compassionately with the slow-moving human systems we all depend on.
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3 things I’ve loved this week
Quote I’m considering:
"The cost of being wrong is less than the cost of doing nothing." -Seth Godin
Article I’m reading:
AI usage is baseline expectation by Tobi, CEO of Shopify
I’ve long admired Shopify, and Tobi, the company’s CEO. I agree with his line in the sand that if anyone isn’t using AI in their daily work, they’ll get left behind.
My favorite new tool:
Fenix PD36R Pro High Lumen Tactical Flashlight
Traipsing through attics and basements, I realized that my iPhone light wasn’t going to suffice. This tactical flashlight – highlight recommended by a variety of reviewers – has been my most important tool.
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Until next week,
Robin
