When Paradigms Shift, Power Follows
To really get what’s happening now, we need to look past the marketing from Silicon Valley. We also need to ignore the scary sci-fi stories. We’re not just seeing a new software tool come out. We’re living through something much bigger. It’s a General Purpose Technology. These are rare. They change everything. They remake the global economy. They shift who has power in the world. They even change what it means to be human.
Experts know this. When a true General Purpose Technology shows up, it doesn’t just create new jobs. It makes us rethink what real power is. Power can be land, coal, factories, or data centers. Now, it’s computing clusters. The old rules just don’t apply anymore.
To understand where AI is going, we should look back. We can compare AI to other huge tech changes in history. This helps us see where it fits. We can see what it’s like. And we can see where it’s different, in a way that’s a bit scary.
The Cognitive Predecessors
Technology has changed how we learn and what we can do. Three big changes stand out. They are the Printing Press, Electricity, and the Internet.
The Printing Press (Memory Outside Our Heads)
Before Gutenberg, sharing knowledge was hard. Only a few people, like scribes, controlled it. The printing press changed that. It put human memory outside our heads. It made reading more common. It broke the scribes’ power. It also helped start the Scientific Revolution. And it led to the modern country.
The AI Connection: The printing press put human memory out there. AI is doing the same for human thinking. For the first time, we’ve made something that can write, check code, and find patterns. It does this without us telling it every step. It means we’ll do less of the actual work. We’ll mostly check and organize things.
Electricity (Power Unbound)
Electricity didn’t just create a new business. It changed every business. It meant power didn’t have to be near water wheels or steam engines. Factories could be built for best results, not just near a power source.
The AI Connection: AI is like the “new electricity.” It’s a basic part of everything now. It’s in self-driving defense systems. It’s in how things get delivered. It’s even in finding new medicines. Like electricity, AI is becoming a normal, unseen thing. It powers our modern world.
The Internet (Faster Connections)
The Internet spread fast, just like AI is now. It moved us from local, old ways to a connected, digital world. Data became super important.
The AI Connection: AI needs the Internet. The big change in AI today, with Large Language Models, couldn’t happen without it. The Internet collected trillions of words, pictures, and code. AI now uses all that information.
The Kinetic Disruptors
The Printing Press, Electricity, and the Internet changed how we think and build things. But history also shows us other kinds of changes. These are kinetic disruptors. They didn’t just change how we see the world. They changed who ran it. AI will also affect these physical power struggles.
- The Stirrup (Changing How We Fight): The stirrup let a rider stand firm on a horse. This sent the horse’s power into a spear. It made shock cavalry a strong weapon. To pay for these expensive fighters, European kings gave them land. This created the feudal system. The technology shaped society.
- Gunpowder (Making Countries Stronger): Gunpowder changed who had power. Before it, local lords had power behind their castle walls. Cannons broke those walls. They broke the lords’ power. War became so costly and complex. Only a strong, central government could afford it. Gunpowder helped create countries.
- The Internal Combustion Engine (New Resources): The engine changed things as much as electricity did. It freed travel from horses and trains. It made farming easier. It helped the world’s population grow fast. It created modern shipping. Oil became a key resource. It shaped global friendships. It changed where people lived. It created the “petrostate” of the 20th century.
The Coming Together and Faster Changes
Every big change makes us rethink who has power. But AI is different. It’s making the time between a new idea and using it much shorter.
It took hundreds of years for the printing press to change Europe. It took decades for electricity to reach everyone. AI is doing many things at once. It’s changing how we think. It’s a new basic power source. And it’s making countries race for computing power and chips.
We’re not just seeing tools slowly get better. We’re seeing a technology that’s speeding up how fast humans become less needed. It’s also speeding up changes in world power.
History is clear: whoever controls the main technology of an era controls that era. The printing press made countries. The engine made petrostates.
So, here’s the question we face: AI is moving from just processing our data. It’s becoming smart on its own. It can create new science. It can write code by itself. It can run digital economies. Who will control this “compute-state”? And what happens to us, the people, when we’re not needed to run it anymore?