Horses

A couple of years back, Mark Pesce gave a fantastic keynote at our summit using the analogy of the history of steam power for trying to understand where we were at and what was happening when it came to large language models and generative AI.

While historical analogies can be misleading, they can also be useful in helping us to get some sense of transformation. Humans are really not intuitively great at understanding exponential change. I often quote a line from Hemingway where someone asks another character how did you go bankrupt, and the reply is, “Two ways: slowly, then suddenly.” We saw during the initial outback of COVID that humans really weren’t great at exponential reasoning, especially when we look at logarithmic graphs.

But what this piece tries to get at is how transformations, such as the transformation from human and animal to steam power which essentially drove the Industrial Revolution, take time. In the case of that transformation, it took a century or so from the mid-18th to the mid-19th century. And for a lot of that time, if the growth is exponential, there’s seemingly very little apparent change. But then something occurs, some tipping point, and something happens. Perhaps around 1820 in the UK, and between 1820 and 1850, we saw this enormous increase in the productive output of Britain’s industrial capability.

So I really recommend reading this article. It’s relatively short. It’s very entertaining and engaging. To try and develop this intuition about how the growing capability of generative AI may impact various kinds of human endeavour.