This is great. Both as a literary condensed history as well as communicating the felt acceleration. There is so much insight in there—some plain and some I feel a bit hidden. There is also a distinction I’m not sure you intend that I want to highlight.
In Year 2, you sketch a world where the political drama is loud and immediate, while Newton lands like a curiosity
Later you’ll realize Newton mattered more. There are insights that will matter because they change what is explainable, but they don’t force themselves on the average person.
In Year 4, the opposite happens:
In January, railways appear [...] By February they’re everywhere.
This isn’t just “better explanations.” It’s an implementation shock that forces adaption via new schedules, wider logistics, and new expectations about distance and time. You can resist Newton’s treatise without penalty; you can’t resist a railway that transports you and your goods.
A lot of “AI at 100x speed” is Newton-like unless it crosses the threshold to railway-like pushing the world.
You even gesture at this: Newcomen’s engine is “hype you don’t see.” Watt’s improvement is “unpleasant but not alarming.” Those are capability jumps that remain optional until they become embedded in institutions and capital stock.
As long as ideas are only conceptual and both their technical as well as social consequences are unknown or in the process of being explored and not implemented, the average person doesn’t see or hear about them. They are only circulated in a smaller research community and then productized by companies—often under significant risk. Only when the ideas are implemented and brought into a form that works for the market of consumer goods, production technology, or social change does the average person see them. This makes the pioneers, not the inventors, of the idea a buffer between the idea and the implementation.
In your piece, you make the effect of the buffers a recurring theme:
But the texture of life is identical in December to what it was in January.
You still read by candlelight, travel by horse, communicate by letter.
You still travel by horse, communicate by letter, go to Church on Sunday.
And you also describe what happens when the buffer gets saturated and the ideas spread wider. Only then does culture, and people’s beliefs and habits update, but slowly and incrementally:
Now people are saying maybe we’re all descended from monkeys instead of Adam and Eve. You don’t believe it.
You still go to church, sometimes, but you don’t really believe anymore.
But the process doesn’t only happen in time. It also happens in space. We see such buffers at work today in the rural to urban difference. Cities run closer to the frontier because they concentrate infrastructure, capital, service networks, etc. Rural areas often lag not because people are behind, but because everything is thinner: fewer institutions per square kilometer, fewer investments, and generally slower cycles. Slowness means delay and many of the innovations haven’t diffused there (yet).
electric light banishes the darkness.
We can see how people felt in Year 4 right now. In many regions in many developing countries, this is not only a lived memory, but still quite common. If not every night, then at least at frequent blackouts. My mother-in-law in rural Kenya has power now, but no TV, no dishwasher, no microwave—in fact, food is prepared on fire. My wife grew up with stories told around the hearth, the only light source. While India has amazingly managed to connect everyone in a short time, a shock like the railroad, in South Sudan, only 5% have electricity.
Even within one country, you can live a digital job life an hour away from a world that is more like “letter and horse.”
So I think your essay nails the psychology. But the element that predicts the experience is not “faster minds.” It’s whether the results of the minds remain Newton-like, i.e., ideas guarded by elites, tried in isolated experiments, and hidden behind mediated interfaces, or if they become railway-like where they get embedded in and reconfigure the environment faster than people can renegotiate norms.
The question becomes: Will buffers remain or not? And that depends on whether humans and human institutions remain in control. Thus my question to you is:
Who do you think will hold the controls?
Not “who has the smartest models,” but who gets end-to-end control over the channels that move material, money, permissions, and enforcement? Do you imagine AI mostly as a datacenter advisory layer inside existing institutions (the geniuses in a datacenter), with humans in the loop? Or do you imagine AI as embodied systems, whether autonomous robots or AI-controlled actuators of many kinds, that directly substitute for human labor and coordination in factories, care, construction, or even security and regulation?
This is great. Both as a literary condensed history as well as communicating the felt acceleration. There is so much insight in there—some plain and some I feel a bit hidden. There is also a distinction I’m not sure you intend that I want to highlight.
In Year 2, you sketch a world where the political drama is loud and immediate, while Newton lands like a curiosity
In Year 4, the opposite happens:
This isn’t just “better explanations.” It’s an implementation shock that forces adaption via new schedules, wider logistics, and new expectations about distance and time. You can resist Newton’s treatise without penalty; you can’t resist a railway that transports you and your goods.
A lot of “AI at 100x speed” is Newton-like unless it crosses the threshold to railway-like pushing the world.
You even gesture at this: Newcomen’s engine is “hype you don’t see.” Watt’s improvement is “unpleasant but not alarming.” Those are capability jumps that remain optional until they become embedded in institutions and capital stock.
As long as ideas are only conceptual and both their technical as well as social consequences are unknown or in the process of being explored and not implemented, the average person doesn’t see or hear about them. They are only circulated in a smaller research community and then productized by companies—often under significant risk. Only when the ideas are implemented and brought into a form that works for the market of consumer goods, production technology, or social change does the average person see them. This makes the pioneers, not the inventors, of the idea a buffer between the idea and the implementation.
In your piece, you make the effect of the buffers a recurring theme:
And you also describe what happens when the buffer gets saturated and the ideas spread wider. Only then does culture, and people’s beliefs and habits update, but slowly and incrementally:
But the process doesn’t only happen in time. It also happens in space. We see such buffers at work today in the rural to urban difference. Cities run closer to the frontier because they concentrate infrastructure, capital, service networks, etc. Rural areas often lag not because people are behind, but because everything is thinner: fewer institutions per square kilometer, fewer investments, and generally slower cycles. Slowness means delay and many of the innovations haven’t diffused there (yet).
We can see how people felt in Year 4 right now. In many regions in many developing countries, this is not only a lived memory, but still quite common. If not every night, then at least at frequent blackouts. My mother-in-law in rural Kenya has power now, but no TV, no dishwasher, no microwave—in fact, food is prepared on fire. My wife grew up with stories told around the hearth, the only light source. While India has amazingly managed to connect everyone in a short time, a shock like the railroad, in South Sudan, only 5% have electricity.
Even within one country, you can live a digital job life an hour away from a world that is more like “letter and horse.”
So I think your essay nails the psychology. But the element that predicts the experience is not “faster minds.” It’s whether the results of the minds remain Newton-like, i.e., ideas guarded by elites, tried in isolated experiments, and hidden behind mediated interfaces, or if they become railway-like where they get embedded in and reconfigure the environment faster than people can renegotiate norms.
The question becomes: Will buffers remain or not? And that depends on whether humans and human institutions remain in control. Thus my question to you is:
Who do you think will hold the controls?
Not “who has the smartest models,” but who gets end-to-end control over the channels that move material, money, permissions, and enforcement? Do you imagine AI mostly as a datacenter advisory layer inside existing institutions (the geniuses in a datacenter), with humans in the loop? Or do you imagine AI as embodied systems, whether autonomous robots or AI-controlled actuators of many kinds, that directly substitute for human labor and coordination in factories, care, construction, or even security and regulation?