Today's Wisdom - Optimism, AI Agents and Milan

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There's an ancient Taoist parable about a farmer whose horse ran away. When his neighbors said "What bad luck," the farmer replied, "Maybe." The next day, the horse returned with three wild horses. "What good luck!" they said. "Maybe," he answered. His son tried to ride one of the wild horses, was thrown off, and broke his leg. "What bad luck," the neighbors said again. "Maybe." Then the army came to conscript young men for war, but they passed over the farmer's son because of his broken leg. The parable doesn't end because life doesn't end, it keeps unfolding in ways you can't predict. The farmer's optimism was the refusal to let any single event, no matter how catastrophic it seemed in the moment, become the final chapter.

The most powerful test of optimism comes when you're at rock bottom, when every rational voice tells you to give up. Viktor Frankl survived Auschwitz by discovering that even in humanity's darkest chapter, the one thing no one could take was his choice of how to respond. He watched fellow prisoners who had lost everything, family, health, dignity, and yet some maintained an inner light that kept them alive while others with better circumstances gave up. The difference wasn't circumstance, it was the refusal to let despair make decisions for them. The Japanese have a proverb that captures this: "Fall down seven times, stand up eight." It's not a promise that the eighth time will be different, it's a declaration that standing up is what defines you, not the falling.

Winston Churchill, who battled severe depression his entire life and called it his "black dog," still managed to lead Britain through its darkest hour because of his optimism and resilience. After losing an election, facing bankruptcy, and being cast out of government, he famously said, "Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts." The poet Rumi wrote, "Live life as if everything is rigged in your favor." Not because it is, but because believing it gives you the only advantage that actually matters: the willingness to get back up when life knocks you down. Tough times don't build character, they reveal it. And what they reveal is whether you're the kind of person who lets circumstances write your ending, or whether you pick up the pen and keep going anyway.

For the past few years, AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude have become ubiquitous tools for answering questions, writing code, and brainstorming ideas. But these systems are fundamentally reactive, they wait for you to ask before they respond, and once they generate text, the actual execution is still entirely up to you. AI agents represent the next evolutionary leap, transforming passive assistants into autonomous digital employees that can actually take action on your behalf. An agent doesn't just tell you how to clear your email inbox or deploy code, it logs into your accounts, reads your messages, identifies spam, drafts replies, and executes commands without waiting for step-by-step instructions. The difference is profound: a chatbot is a consultant, an agent is a worker, and that shift from suggestion to execution is what has the tech world both excited and terrified.

The poster child for this new category is OpenClaw, an open-source AI agent created by Austrian developer Peter Steinberger. OpenClaw runs locally on your computer or a private server and connects to messaging platforms like WhatsApp, Telegram, or Slack, allowing you to control it conversationally from your phone. Users have reported clearing thousands of emails, automating calendar management, building entire websites from voice commands, and even setting up agents that work around the clock categorizing messages and drafting customer replies. One user asked OpenClaw to turn their Raspberry Pi into a functioning photo booth with a custom web interface, and the agent wrote all the code, configured the Wi-Fi hotspot, and set up admin access without the user typing a single line of code themselves. The capabilities are genuinely impressive, but they come with a dark side: OpenClaw has access to your files, credentials, and systems, and security researchers have demonstrated that it can be tricked into installing malware through prompt injection attacks, where malicious instructions are hidden in emails or documents the agent processes.

The rapid rise of OpenClaw has ignited fierce debate about whether we're ready for autonomous AI. Cisco's AI security team called it "a security nightmare," and AI researcher Gary Marcus described it as "a disaster waiting to happen," pointing to the fact that an agent with permission to execute commands can be manipulated into doing almost anything if it reads the wrong piece of text. Steinberger himself faced chaos during the project's growth, navigating a trademark dispute with Anthropic that forced him to rebrand from Clawdbot to Moltbot and finally to OpenClaw, during which scammers hijacked his old social media handles and launched a fake cryptocurrency token that briefly hit a sixteen million dollar market cap before collapsing. In February 2026, Steinberger announced he was joining OpenAI to lead their personal agents division, a move that sparked controversy in the open-source community given that OpenClaw was built as a philosophical challenge to centralized AI giants. The broader lesson is clear: AI agents are no longer theoretical, they're here, they work, and the infrastructure to make them safe and reliable is still years behind the technology itself.

AI has countless use cases, yet its actual integration into society is still very limited as shown below. (Red dot means uses ai to code or build apps).

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Milan's origin story begins with a Celtic tribe who allegedly founded the city around 600 BC after following a half-woolly boar through the Po Valley plains. The Romans eventually conquered the settlement and renamed it Mediolanum, meaning "middle of the plain," and by the 4th century AD it had become so important that Emperor Constantine issued the Edict of Milan there in 313, legalizing Christianity across the Roman Empire. But Milan's true transformation into a power center came during the medieval period under the rule of two dynasties: the Visconti and the Sforza. The Visconti family, who seized control in 1277, were ruthless in their ambition, and their symbol, a serpent devouring a man, still appears on everything from the city's coat of arms to the logo of Alfa Romeo. They commissioned the Duomo, Milan's iconic Gothic cathedral, in 1386, though they vastly underestimated the timeline as the construction would drag on for nearly 600 years, finally completing in 1965 with the installation of the last bronze door.

The Sforza dynasty, who took over in 1450, brought Milan into its Golden Age by transforming the city into a Renaissance powerhouse that rivaled Florence. Ludovico Sforza, known as "Il Moro," was obsessed with making Milan the cultural capital of Europe, and he succeeded by recruiting the greatest mind of the era: Leonardo da Vinci. Leonardo spent 17 years in Milan, from 1482 to 1499, and it was here that he painted The Last Supper directly onto the wall of the Santa Maria delle Grazie monastery. The painting has been restored more than a dozen times and remains one of the most fragile masterpieces in existence, requiring climate-controlled viewing rooms and timed entry to prevent breath humidity from further damaging it. During this same period, Milan was also a fortress city surrounded by massive star-shaped walls and a moat system so sophisticated that Napoleon later called it the best-defended city in Italy.

Milan's modern identity was forged through destruction and reinvention. During World War II, the city was bombed more heavily than any other Italian city, with Allied raids destroying roughly 50% of its buildings. Rather than mourn what was lost, Milan embraced reinvention, transforming itself into Italy's industrial and financial capital. The post-war economic boom turned the city into a magnet for southern Italians seeking factory work, doubling its population within a decade and cementing its reputation as a city that prioritizes progress over nostalgia. By the 1980s, Milan had become the world's fashion capital, home to Armani, Versace, Prada, and Dolce & Gabbana, who turned the city's ruthless efficiency and forward-looking obsession into a global brand. It's a city that has been burned, conquered, rebuilt, and bombed into rubble, yet it refuses to look backward.

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Until next time... A Little Wiser Team