Steam, Stainless Steel, and Infinite Minds
Original: Steam, Steel, and Infinite Minds
Steam created the Gilded Age, but ultimately sparked profound change. AI today looks like a bubble, but in the end, it will bring about earth-shattering transformation.
Initially, textile mills were built along rivers, using water to power machines, but this was constrained by seasons and geography.
Steam was the driving force of the Second Industrial Revolution. Mills replaced rivers with steam engines, and later even updated their architecture to achieve decoupling. When electricity arrived, it sparked another change: factories deployed multiple small machines, achieving decentralization.
The future is already here — it's just not evenly distributed. In hindsight, we'll realize that today is the beginning of that future.
When cars first appeared, a flag-bearer would walk ahead carrying a flag to clear the way, much like the early AI coding tools. Steve Jobs said that the personal computer is the bicycle of the human mind. Now, through agents, programmers can multiply their productivity by dozens of times, evolving from riding a bicycle to driving a car.
Coding has some inherent advantages: everything needed for the job can be concentrated in the IDE, and the quality of work can be verified through tests. Applying AI to other intellectual work faces two problems: scattered context and difficulty in verification.
The earliest companies were workshops. As the number of employees within an organization grew, it would reach its limit once it expanded to a certain scale, and performance would decline.
Early buildings were only a few stories high because steel was very heavy. When stainless steel appeared, we could build skyscrapers, as it was not only lighter but also much easier to manipulate.
The information system is the infrastructure for communication within an organization, which made multinational corporations possible. This means we are using human-scale tools to solve industrial-scale problems, and we still face the issue of cognitive overload.
AI can be either the infinite mind or the stainless steel that supports an organization. With these two magic tools, organizations can avoid efficiency loss even after expansion. Currently, AI is bolted into human workflows like a screw, and humans still need to stay in the loop to watch over AI. But the ultimate direction should be for humans to observe from a higher level. Long meetings will be greatly reduced, replaced by a few minutes of asynchronous meetings.