Simon Dodson

I Swore Off Murder Mysteries 20 Years Ago. Real Estate is the Same. Twenty years ago, I invested five seasons in a Scottish murder mystery. Weekend after weekend, following red herrings through Highland moors, parsing accents, tracking alibis. The reveal was so cheap, so intellectually insulting, that I made a vow: never again. Real estate is that series, except it’s your life savings playing detective. The setup is identical.

There's a sentence I keep hearing whispered in boardrooms, sometimes as paranoia, sometimes as prophecy: "Are we in the last generation of websites?" The phrasing alone tells you everything. Not the death of the internet, not the collapse of commerce, not some cyberpunk fantasy where we jack into neural feeds. Just... websites. The humble rectangle of pixels where we've been told to live, buy, learn, confess, and scroll since 1996.

There’s a paradox at the heart of AI hype that nobody wants to admit: AI doesn’t make you smarter. It makes you faster, cleaner, and sometimes sharper — but only within the ceiling you’ve already built for yourself. Think of it as the AI Ceiling Paradox. AI is catalytic, not transcendent. It won’t raise your ceiling. It just clears the rubble on the floor, removes the trip hazards, and maybe lays out a neat staircase so you can climb toward the roof beams you already installed.