From Stone to Models — The Compression of Human Invention
Two point six million years passed between the first deliberately chipped stone edge and the first controlled use of fire. Twenty-seven years passed between the public internet and a machine that drafts a legal brief on request. Somewhere in that arithmetic is the whole history of human invention, and it is not primarily a story about tools getting better. It is a story about the gap between tools shrinking, relentlessly, until the gap itself became the news. AI is not a rupture with that history. It is the newest point on a curve that has bent the same direction since a hominin first swung a rock with an edge on it — and the open question is whether a species built for millennium-scale change can now survive a decade-scale one. …