Summary
Every era is shaped by its miracle material—steel, semiconductors, now AI as “infinite minds”—and those who master it define what comes next.
Main Points
- New tech disguises itself as old: phone calls like telegrams, movies like filmed plays, AI chatbots like search boxes
- AI upgrades knowledge workers from bicycle to car; orchestrating agents makes a 10x engineer into 30-40x
- AI is steel for organizations—human communication no longer has to be the load-bearing wall
- Real gains come from redesigning around the new power source, not just swapping waterwheels for steam engines
- The pattern scales: individuals → organizations → whole economies
My Take
On the rearview mirror problem: I loved the image of the Google search input box next to the ChatGPT chat input box—identical. The begged question: what does a form native to the new technology look like? He diagnoses the filmed play but doesn’t show us the moving camera.
On context and agents: You don’t package things up for the agent. The agent has to figure it out themselves. Sort of bitter lesson-like. But it would be nice to have a launch pad or home base for them.
On structure: The progression from individuals to megacity economies—I didn’t notice it in the reading. Makes me want more concrete details of what the transformation actually looks like.
Quotes
Every era is shaped by its miracle material. Steel forged the Gilded Age. Semiconductors switched on the Digital Age. Now AI has arrived as infinite minds.
This future is often difficult to predict because it always disguises itself as the past. Early phone calls were concise like telegrams. Early movies looked like filmed plays.
Walk by his desk and you’ll see him orchestrating three or four AI coding agents at once, and they don’t just type faster, they think, which together makes him a 30-40× engineer… He’s become a manager of infinite minds.
AI is steel for organizations. It has the potential to maintain context across workflows and surface decisions when needed without the noise. Human communication no longer has to be the load-bearing wall.
The real breakthrough came when factory owners realized they could decouple from water entirely… We’re still in the “swap out the waterwheel” phase. AI chatbots bolted onto existing tools.