Two Books. One Purpose. A Better Life.“This is a masterpiece.”—Morgan Housel, Author, Psychology of Money“Discover the extraordinary within.”—Manish Chokhani, Director, Enam HoldingsClick here to buy BoundlessClick here to buy SketchbookClick here to buy the combo (Boundless + Sketchbook)Around 2016, leading artificial intelligence scientist Geoffrey Hinton made a startling prediction: “People should stop training radiologists now.” His reasoning was that within five years, machines would completely revolutionise radiology, and that much of radiology application would be powered by AI. Radiologists would thus no longer be needed.Hinton was right… and also wrong.He was right that AI would invade radiology. Today, almost every radiology workflow is AI-assisted. But he was wrong about what that would do to radiologists. The number of radiologists actually increased. Why?Well, I came across this “Hinton Paradox” while listening to an interview with NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang, where he made a distinction between “the task” and “the purpose” of a job.Every job has tasks and purpose. In the case of a radiologist, the task is to study scans. But the purpose is to diagnose disease. The moment you absorb this properly, the paradox stops being a paradox. AI can take over tasks and do them faster, better, and cheaper. But purpose is different. Purpose is not just a checklist or a mechanical function. It sits inside human intent. And it turns out that what the world truly needs is not fewer people doing tasks, but more people fulfilling purpose. This is because as tasks get cheaper and faster, society raises its expectations of what “good” looks like.When AI makes it easy to scan faster, the world doesn’t say, “Great, we can fire radiologists.” The world says, “Great, now we can diagnose earlier, diagnose more people, reduce misses, run second opinions, detect patterns at scale, and treat disease before it becomes tragedy.” In other words, automating tasks doesn’t reduce demand for purpose, but often expands it.I think this simple distinction between task versus purpose is one of the clearest lenses we as investors can use to understand the next decade.As business analysts, we are doing what we often do when faced with technological change: we jump to the most obvious conclusion. If AI can do X, then humans doing X will become obsolete. If AI can write, writers will be finished. If AI can code, programmers will vanish. If AI can analyse financial statements, analysts will die. If AI can generate stock ideas, investors will become unnecessary.It all sounds so neat and logical, like the type of story the brain loves. But the world does not behave like a clean story (like one we were told growing up – “Ek tha raja, ek thi rani, dono mar gaye khatm kahaani”). It behaves like radiology. And investors, of all people, should know by now how dangerous it is to fall in love with a clean story.When you apply second-level thinking, you see that AI doesn’t replace jobs. It replaces parts of jobs. It replaces tasks. It turns certain activities into utilities. It makes certain skills abundant. And when a skill becomes abundant, it becomes less valuable as a task. But sometimes it becomes more valuable as an ingredient inside a larger purpose. This is the part people miss.When calculators arrived, mathematicians didn’t disappear. When spreadsheets arrived, finance didn’t vanish. When the internet arrived, information didn’t stop being valuable. What changed was not whether the work existed, but what type of work created value. The centre of gravity shifted from task-based effort to purpose-based judgment.Now, let me bring this to the profession of investing, because this is where the framework becomes uncomfortable in a very useful way.Most investors think their job is to do tasks, like reading annual reports, monitoring stock price movements, building models, screening stocks, studying charts, listening to management commentary, attending investment meetups, and staying updated with news. And yes, those are tasks. Many of them are important tasks.But here’s the real question: what is the purpose of investing?It is not to be updated. It is not to have opinions. It is not to make predictions.The purpose is simple: to allocate capital in a way that compounds long-term purchasing power while surviving uncertainty and avoiding permanent loss. That is the purpose. Everything else is either a servant of that purpose, or a distraction disguised as productivity.If we accept this, then a lot of investing behaviour we see around, including ours, starts to look a bit ridiculous. Because we are all drowning in “tasks”:Confusing activity with progress and being informed with being wise,Watching markets daily even though our “time horizon” is supposedly 10-20 years,Obsessing over quarterly results even though our thesis is based on long-term compounding, andConsuming information like a person eating junk food, just because we are anxious and bored and need something to chew on.Slowly, without realising it, we become participants in the stock market rather than investors in businesses. The focus shifts from patient allocation of capital to being reactive in a noisy casino.Worse, AI has only intensified this confusion by making our lives task-rich, information-heavy, and saturated with analysis. The proof lies all around us. Watch your time spent as an investor. You are doing more, watching more, reading more, and possibly reacting more.The irony is that in investing, more tasks do not necessarily mean better outcomes. In fact, more tasks often have the opposite effect. They make you feel in control while subtly weakening the thing that matters most—your ability to judge. This is like playing a losing game.On the other hand, the investor who defines their job by purpose will use AI as a power tool. They will say: “Good. Now I can do the tasks in one hour instead of ten. Now what should I do with the remaining nine hours?” That question is everything. Because it forces a shift from being obsessed about tasks to being obsessed about the purpose. And the latter is where the real edge lives.Now, what does purpose-obsession look like in investing? It looks like:Developing a temperament that can handle uncertainty,Building a philosophy of risk,Knowing what you don’t know, and being fine with it,Building the capacity to wait without feeling useless,Having the courage to do nothing when nothing should be done,Understanding businesses deeply enough to hold them through pain,Designing a portfolio that survives bad luck, not one that performs well in an Excel sheet, andRecognising that investing is not primarily an intellectual game but an emotional game disguised as an intellectual one.Many investors would rather do tasks because tasks are comforting. Tasks give you the illusion of control.Purpose, however, is scarier because it forces you to face uncertainty and responsibility.When you say your purpose is to compound wealth without permanent loss, you cannot hide behind “I read a lot.” You cannot hide behind “I did the work.” You must own your decisions.The future—in investing, radiology, or anywhere—will reward those who understand purpose more deeply.As investors, in a world of infinite information, we have moved towards scarcity of attention. And so, even as everyone has access to AI-driven analysis and instant research, the edge will not come from knowing more, but from being more discerning and wiser.It will come from being purpose-driven, not task-driven.Honestly, I see that as the real gift hidden inside this whole AI moment. It’s forcing us to ask a question we should have been asking all along: What is my work really about? What am I actually here to do? What is the purpose beneath the tasks?The radiologist’s task is to read scans. The purpose is to diagnose disease. The investor’s task is to read information. The purpose is to allocate capital wisely and survive. If you don’t know the difference, you will drown in tasks. If you do know the difference, you might just build one of the greatest edges for your investing and life.Two Books. One Purpose. A Better Life.“This is a masterpiece.”—Morgan Housel, Author, Psychology of Money“Discover the extraordinary within.”—Manish Chokhani, Director, Enam HoldingsClick here to buy BoundlessClick here to buy SketchbookClick here to buy the combo (Boundless + Sketchbook)Also Watch:NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang on Reasoning Models, Robotics, and Refuting the “AI Bubble” NarrativeThe post A Powerful Investing Framework to Survive the AI Decade appeared first on Safal Niveshak.