FROM PAPYRUS TO NEURAL NETWORKS: A DUMMY'S GUIDE TO INNOVATION AND PANIC

PART ONE. HOW SOCRATES LOOKED FOR THE DELETE BUTTON, AND THE ELITE GOT SPOOKED BY CROSSBOWS

I happen to belong to that peculiar generation that somehow managed to survive the journey from leaky fountain pens to the omnipresent internet. When I was just starting out in this world, the smart folks around me were already predicting the end of days just because somebody invented a desktop calculator. Since then, the scenery has changed a bit: personal computers showed up, drones are buzzing around the sky, and now artificial intelligence is writing our texts for us.

And you know what? The internet is once again crawling with respectable gentlemen — politicians, opinion leaders, and even men of science — who are predicting our imminent doom from these very same contraptions with a tremble in their voice. If you somehow got the notion that this panic is some unique achievement of our modern age, I hate to burst your bubble. Human nature is remarkably stubborn: we have always been scared silly of tomorrow and fought tooth and nail against anything more complicated than a plain old wheel. And the funny thing is, the brightest minds of their time were always marching right at the front of the panic parade.

AN ANCIENT GREEK TRAGEDY: A SMARTPHONE MADE OF PAPYRUS

Let’s take Ancient Greece, for example. Around 370 BC. Picture Athens and that eccentric old sage Socrates, strolling around in his toga and dead seriously trying to convince the youth that their newfangled fad — writing down their thoughts on papyrus — was going to drive civilization straight into the ditch. In one of Plato's dialogues, this greatest of thinkers complains that the alphabet is a devilishly harmful piece of work.

To prove his point, he spins a tall tale about the Egyptian King Thamus, who was offered the invention of writing to make his people wiser. To which the wise king supposedly replied: THIS INNOVATION OF YOURS WILL BREED FORGETFULNESS IN THEIR SOULS. Socrates’ arguments sound astonishingly like today’s grumbling about Google and neural networks:

1️⃣ BRAIN ATROPHY. Socrates swore by all the gods of Olympus that writing would kill human memory. People, he reckoned, would start relying on these soulless squiggles instead of exercising their own noggins.

2️⃣ THE ILLUSION OF SMARTS. He predicted that the ability to read other people's texts without a proper teacher would make youngsters incredibly arrogant. They’d just «hear about a lot of things» without understanding squat, and fancy themselves know-it-alls. That right there is a flawless ancient description of an armchair expert with Wikipedia access.

3️⃣ DEAD WORDS. To top it all off, Socrates grumbled that a written text is like a painting: it looks alive, but the second you ask it a tricky question, it keeps a majestic and utterly useless silence. In a real man's argument, papyrus ain't worth a hill of beans.

And what happened? Did Athens collapse because somebody figured out how to write down a couple of smart thoughts? Not by a long shot. Offloading memory onto an external drive allowed humanity to stockpile so much knowledge that not a single one of those brilliant ancient heads, no matter how bright, could have possibly crammed it all in.

A MEDIEVAL STARTUP: THE CROSSBOW VERSUS ARMORED INVESTORS

Now let's jump a couple of thousand years forward, to the year 1139. If the Greeks were worried about their brains, the medieval elite was shaking in their boots over their wallets and social status. The Second Lateran Council, under the watchful eye of Pope Innocent II, issued a strict decree: absolutely ban the use of crossbows in wars between decent Christians. This weapon was solemnly declared a deadly art, hateful to God.

You might shed a tear of emotion, thinking that the Vatican suddenly got bitten by the pacifist bug. But the truth, as it usually does, smelled strictly of money and power. In those glorious days, a knight clad in armor was something akin to a modern tank. His gear cost a small fortune, and learning how to swing a sword without chopping off your own horse's ear took years of grueling practice.

And then the crossbow enters the stage — a nasty, cheap, and incredibly armor-piercing invention. Suddenly, any unwashed peasant who hadn't spent a single day on military drill could hide behind a bush, pull a trigger, and punch a hole right through the obscenely expensive armor of a hereditary aristocrat. This wasn't just a weapon; it was an outrageous breach of the chain of command! The noble lords were scared to death that their investments in their own greatness had gone down the drain because of a piece of wood with a tight string. The elite realized: THEIR TIME WAS UP.

Did the Pope's ban help? Of course not. Nobody has ever managed to use a piece of paper and a wax seal to stop a technology that solves problems cheaply and efficiently. The crossbow changed the rules of the game forever and knocked the knights right off their pedestal.

INSTEAD OF A MORAL

So there you have human nature in a nutshell. Whether it's a genius philosopher terrified of losing his monopoly on wisdom, or an arrogant knight trembling over his monopoly on violence — the first reaction to any worthwhile invention is always exactly the same. We try to ban it, loudly citing the doom of humanity or the will of the Almighty. But deep down, we're just terrified that the new world is going to leave us stranded on the side of the road.

PART TWO. GUTENBERG'S PRINTING PRESS AND THE MACHINE UPRISING THAT NEVER WAS

IN THE LAST PART, WE FIGURED OUT THAT SOCRATES WAS SCARED SENSELESS OF WRITING, AND THE MEDIEVAL KNIGHTS TRIED TO CANCEL CROSSBOWS. BUT THE REAL HYSTERICS KICKED OFF LATER, WHEN TECHNOLOGY GOT ITS GRUBBY HANDS ON INFORMATION AND JOBS.

Picture Europe before 1450. A book back then wasn't just a well of knowledge; it was something akin to a custom-built luxury carriage. Monks spent years copying tomes by hand, agonizing over every single letter. Barely twelve percent of Europeans KNEW THEIR ABCs. Knowledge was an elite, closed-door club for the insiders, where the church and the aristocracy held an absolute monopoly on the truth.

And then along comes Johannes Gutenberg with his printing press. Absolute disaster strikes: knowledge suddenly becomes cheap, mass-produced, and — heaven forbid! — available to the common rabble.

THE PANIC OF THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE HURT FEELINGS OF COPYWRITERS

Today we chuckle at folks who fret that neural networks are going to steal the jobs of writers and journalists. But back in the late fifteenth century, there lived a monk and scribe in Venice named Filippo de Strata, who kicked up a colossal fuss over this very thing.

Filippo penned a furious letter to the Doge of Venice demanding that printers be run out of town and their presses smashed to kindling. His main argument went down in history: THE PEN IS A VIRGIN, BUT THE PRINTING PRESS IS A WHORE.

He was mighty outraged that these printers were chasing a quick buck instead of caring about the quality of the texts. Filippo prophesied that cheap books would corrupt minds, because now any half-wit could buy a little book for a couple of pennies and fancy himself a profound genius. Sound familiar? That’s your classic, garden-variety complaint about modern social media and the internet right there.

THE FIRST INFORMATION OVERDOSE AND MEDIEVAL CLICKBAIT

The printing press set off processes that the human brain was woefully unprepared for.

1️⃣ INFORMATION OVERLOAD. For the first time in history, learned men started whining that they physically couldn't read everything that was being published. The medieval Fear Of Missing Out was born. If a fellow used to read ten books in his entire lifetime and got called a scholar, now hundreds of new volumes were piling up every single month.

2️⃣ THE BIRTH OF FAKE NEWS. If you reckon fake news was invented in our day and age, Gutenberg would laugh you right out of the room. As soon as print shop owners figured out that THEOLOGICAL SNOOZEFESTS didn't sell half as well as scandals, intrigues, and gossip, the boom of medieval clickbait was officially on.

3️⃣ VIRAL CONSPIRACY THEORIES. The spookiest example was a book called the «Malleus Maleficarum» (The Hammer of Witches), published in 1487. Before the printing press came along, paranoid notions about mass witchcraft were mostly just muttered in very tight circles. But the print shops churned this piece of work out all over Europe. It was this viral text that sparked a years-long mass hysteria. The technology just took human fears and cranked the volume up to eleven.

THE MACHINE UPRISING THAT NEVER WAS. THE WHOLE TRUTH ABOUT THE LUDDITES

If Gutenberg robbed the elite of their monopoly on knowledge, a couple of centuries later came a crisis that hurt a whole lot worse. People started losing cold, hard cash.

Today, folks throw around the word Luddite to insult any old fogey who can't figure out a smartphone or gets the jitters talking to ChatGPT. We were taught in school that early nineteenth-century England was full of backwards, ignorant laborers who were so terrified of machines they smashed them with sledgehammers out of pure fright.

THAT IS THE GRANDEST TALL TALE IN HISTORY.

The original Luddites weren't technophobes in the slightest. They were highly skilled weavers and craftsmen, the genuine labor aristocracy of their day. A man had to study for seven long years just to learn the trade!

And then the factory bosses swoop in, set up new mechanized looms, and hire unskilled women and children for pennies just to pull the levers. What would you do if your seven years of grueling education and high social standing WENT UP IN SMOKE just to line the pockets of a greedy corporation?

HARDBALL NEGOTIATIONS IN THE AGE OF WILD CAPITALISM

The Luddites didn't smash looms because they were scared of gears and progress. It was their way of conducting hardball union negotiations in an era of wild capitalism, back when labor protection laws weren't even a glimmer in anyone's eye.

They weren't demanding a stop to science; they were demanding fair pricing, a minimum wage, and a shred of social security. Wrecking the factory owners' property was the only language of economic blackmail available to them. The British government got so spooked by them that they sent more troops to crush the Luddites than they sent to fight Napoleon in the Iberian Peninsula! And they made breaking a loom an offense punishable by the hangman's noose.

INSTEAD OF A MORAL

Whether it's the printing press or the power loom — both inventions broke the old way of life beyond repair. Gutenberg kicked off an information free-for-all, and the industrial looms sparked a social powder keg.

Today, as we stare in horror at neural network deepfakes and wring our hands over artificial intelligence stealing jobs from programmers, copywriters, and designers, it pays to remember: we are just going through the exact same growing pains. Every breakthrough technology first multiplies the chaos and wrecks the old economy, stirring up a hornet's nest of folks who were sitting pretty. And only later, after we've THROWN OUR FIT and calmed down, do we learn how to live with it and wring some phenomenal good out of the whole mess.

PART THREE. HOW TRAINS MELTED BRAINS AND ELECTRICITY SUCKED UP THE RAIN

IN THE PREVIOUS PARTS, WE FIGURED OUT THAT SOCRATES WAS TERRIFIED OF WRITING, AND THE LUDDITES SMASHED LOOMS NOT OUT OF STUPIDITY, BUT BECAUSE OF THE FACTORY OWNERS' GREED. BUT IF INFORMATION AND JOBS CAUSED SOCIAL STRESS, THE ARRIVAL OF NEW INFRASTRUCTURE SPARKED A GENUINE CLINICAL PANIC.

THE MEDICAL HEEBIE-JEEBIES OVER SPEED

Today we calmly sip our coffee in an airplane at an altitude of thirty thousand feet, cruising at five hundred miles an hour. Now picture a respectable gentleman from the nineteenth century, whose absolute speed limit for the entire history of mankind was capped at a horse's gallop.

When the first passenger railway opened in England in 1825, society was gripped by a full-blown medical hysteria. Esteemed professors of medicine were dead serious when they published tracts claiming that the human body was biologically unfit for speeds exceeding twenty miles an hour, AND PASSENGERS WOULD SIMPLY FLY TO PIECES. It's worth noting that these brilliant medical minds writing this nonsense WERE THE EXACT SAME QUACKS TREATING THE COMMON COLD WITH BLOODLETTING AND ARSENIC!

They swore up and down that passengers wouldn't be able to breathe at such speeds because the air would be sucked right out of their lungs, and watching the scenery blur past the window would inevitably lead to irreversible brain damage and blindness. The newspapers were plastered with headlines warning that the JOLTING in the carriages would turn internal organs to mush, and a woman's uterus might just fall right out. Sounds like the ravings of a lunatic, doesn't it? But millions of people swallowed this balderdash hook, line, and sinker!

THE RED FLAG ACT AND THE FIGHT FOR MONOPOLY

When the first automobiles sputtered onto the scene, the absurdity hit rock bottom. The horse lobby and the railroad barons SAW THE WRITING ON THE WALL and decided to crush the competition using the heavy hand of the law.

In 1865, Britain passed the phenomenally idiotic «Locomotive Act», better known as the «Red Flag Act». According to this masterpiece of jurisprudence, every SELF-PROPELLED CARRIAGE had to be preceded by a man walking on foot, waving a red flag (or a lantern at night). His job was to warn pedestrians and horses of the impending doom.

And here’s the kicker: the law capped the speed of these contraptions at two miles an hour in town and four in the country. Meaning the car was traveling slower than a man out for a stroll. This ridiculous law slammed the brakes on the British auto industry for a solid thirty years! Truly, THERE IS NOTHING MORE INVENTIVE THAN A BUREAUCRAT PROTECTING SOMEONE ELSE'S BUSINESS FROM PROGRESS. And all of this, naturally, was served up to the public under the righteous guise of protecting their safety. Remind you of any modern attempts to regulate the IT sector?

TELEGRAPH POLES AND STEALING THE RAIN

But the undisputed heavyweight champion of generating fear was electricity. Today, if the power goes out for an hour, we act like we've been thrown back into the Stone Age. But in the nineteenth century, wires were considered the Devil's own handiwork.

When the first telegraph lines started snaking across Europe, the peasants panicked. Down in Sicily, for instance, tough-looking fellas with axes made a habit of chopping down telegraph poles. Why? Because some local bigwig started a rumor that these HUMMING WIRES WERE SUCKING UP THE RAIN CLOUDS and causing droughts.

In other parts, folks were dead certain the telegraph was spreading cholera through the air. It’s strikingly similar to a couple of years ago, when people were seriously setting fire to 5G towers because they believed they were broadcasting the coronavirus. Two hundred years have come and gone, and the level of basic technical literacy and the eagerness to believe in magical hocus-pocus haven't budged an inch.

THE NEW YORK WIRE PANIC

Even when electricity finally started making its way into homes, the fear didn't pack its bags. In 1889, New York City experienced the infamous «Wire Panic». The city was tangled in thousands of chaotically strung wires. When a hurricane snapped the lines and killed a few people, the newspapers WENT INTO A COMPLETE MELTDOWN.

Journalists wrote that electricity was an invisible demon hiding in the walls of your house, just waiting for the chance to fry you to a crisp. Respectable citizens held perfectly serious discussions about wearing RUBBER SPACESUITS on the street to save themselves from stray currents. You could safely call that THE ABSOLUTE PINNACLE OF HUMAN FEAR. And US President Benjamin Harrison, whose White House HAD JUST BEEN WIRED FOR ELECTRICITY, was so terrified of touching the switches that he made his servants do it until the day he left office.

IN LIEU OF A MORAL

The history of trains, cars, and electricity proves one thing brilliantly: we aren't scared of the technology itself; we're scared of what we don't understand. Our brains are lazy and suspicious. Any invisible or overly fast contraption gets automatically filed away under black magic and the DEVIL'S HANDIWORK.

Today, we're just as terrified of artificial intelligence algorithms simply because we can't figure out how that BLACK BOX makes its decisions. And, just like in the nineteenth century, there will always be slick lobbyists happy to turn a profit on that fear, demanding we ban neural networks and drones under the guise of looking out for our well-being. And we, like a bunch of fools, are once again ready to run out ahead of progress, waving a red flag.

PART FOUR. CALCULOHOLICS, COMPUTER-PHOBIA, AND WEDDING DRONES

IN THE PREVIOUS CHAPTERS, WE REMINISCED ABOUT HOW OUR ANCESTORS QUAKED IN THEIR BOOTS AT THE SIGHT OF PRINTING PRESSES, TRAINS, AND ELECTRIC WIRES. BUT LET'S LEAVE THE BEARDED KNIGHTS AND GENTLEMEN IN TOP HATS IN PEACE FOR A SPELL. LET'S TALK ABOUT THINGS THAT HAPPENED IN OUR OWN LIFETIME.

I remember the seventies and eighties clear as a bell. It was a time when a slide rule in your pocket was the absolute peak of technological high fashion, and the arrival of the electronic calculator struck the same holy terror into the hearts of math teachers that ChatGPT strikes into copywriters today.

THE WAR ON CALCULATORS AND A DIAGNOSIS FOR SCHOOLCHILDREN

When affordable calculators started flooding into schools and colleges, the academic world practically had a stroke. Math teachers marched out in actual protests, waving picket signs. They were dead serious when they claimed that this devilry with buttons would forever destroy a child's ability to do arithmetic.

THESE EDUCATORS SINCERELY BELIEVED THAT IF YOU ROBBED A CHILD OF THE HOLY SUFFERING OF LONG DIVISION, HE WOULD IMMEDIATELY DEVOLVE STRAIGHT BACK TO A HOWLING APE. The press even coined a perfectly official, spine-chilling medical term — CALCULOHOLICS. That's what they called schoolchildren who had supposedly developed a clinical addiction to electronic counting and could no longer add two and two in their own heads.

And how did it all end? Did the science of mathematics collapse into ruin? Quite the contrary! Freed from the mind-numbing chore of spending hours calculating fractions on a scrap of paper, students were able to focus on higher mathematics, logic, and topology. The calculator went from being the assassin of the intellect to a basic tool that vastly expanded our cognitive horizons.

SOVIET CYBERNETICS: FROM QUACKERY TO CURE-ALL

While the West was busy fighting a holy war against calculators, the Soviet Union was staging its own purely ideological tragicomedy. In the early fifties, party ideologues branded cybernetics as a reactionary, obscurantist pseudoscience cooked up by scheming imperialists. The theory of machine control, you see, contradicted good old Marxist-Leninist materialism.

But playing the ideological purity game didn't last long. IDEOLOGY IS A SPLENDID THING FOR POUNDING THE PODIUM, BUT WHEN YOU NEED A BALLISTIC MISSILE TO ACTUALLY HIT THE TARGET, MARXISM QUICKLY AND QUIETLY STEPS ASIDE FOR DESPISED MATHEMATICS. It turned out that without this so-called pseudoscience, the air defense systems wouldn't work, and the whole military machine was going to hell in a handbasket.

And then came a breathtaking somersault: the Soviet establishment frantically rehabilitated cybernetics. In just a few short years, it went from being THE HIRED HARLOT OF IMPERIALISM to the great white hope of the Soviet economy. It’s a textbook example of how state ideology tries to cancel a technology, but in the end, technology always cancels the ideology.

COMPUTER-PHOBIA IN THE BOARDROOM

But the most comical stage hit in the eighties, when the first personal computers rolled out. Today, we can't picture a businessman without a laptop. But forty years ago, a full-blown epidemic of COMPUTER-PHOBIA was raging through the corporate world.

And it wasn't the lowly clerks suffering from it; it was the top executives! In those days, typing on a keyboard was considered strictly women's work, a job for a secretary. A respectable executive with a cigar was supposed to dictate, and the typist was supposed to type. When they started putting PCs on the desks of the big bosses, those fellas had a downright panic attack. THERE IS NOTHING IN THIS WORLD MORE PATHETIC THAN A DIGNIFIED EXECUTIVE WITH A CIGAR, FROZEN STIFF IN FRONT OF A KEYBOARD, TERRIFIED THAT HIS UNDERLINGS MIGHT CATCH HIM PECKING AT IT WITH ONE FINGER LIKE A TERRIFIED WOODPECKER. For a company vice president, sitting down at a keyboard meant a public loss of face.

HOW A NOBEL LAUREATE DUG A GRAVE FOR THE INTERNET

If you reckon we got any smarter by the time the nineties rolled around, you are sorely mistaken. In 1998, when the internet was already creeping into every home, one of the most respected economists on the planet, the future Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman, delivered a historic forecast.

He flat-out declared that the internet's impact on the economy would be NO GREATER THAN THE FAX MACHINE'S. In his esteemed opinion, people would simply get tired of STARING AT SCREENS. That prediction went straight into the hall of fame of humanity's most epic technological blunders. As you can see, having a Nobel Prize on your mantle doesn't save you from the classic mistake: judging the technologies of tomorrow through the stubborn habits of yesterday.

PHYSICAL AUTOMATION AND THE EVOLUTION OF DRONES

Today, our panic has jumped from the digital world back into the physical one. We're terrified of robots. When factories started bringing in industrial arms, the labor unions dusted off the old Luddite playbook. And the arrival of humanoid robots triggered the so-called uncanny valley effect — a deep psychological revulsion toward an object that looks and acts almost human, but isn't.

But the most glaring example of the dialectic of innovation is the drone. Just ten years ago, these were funny, buzzing little toys used to shoot pretty pictures at weddings and on vacations. Military generals looked down their noses at them with condescending smirks, preferring to pour billions into heavy armor.

And what are we seeing today in Ukraine? A shortage of artillery shells forced engineers to strap high explosives to a dirt-cheap commercial FPV drone. This forced civilian innovation literally turned global military doctrine on its head. GENERALS PREFER TO FIGHT WARS WITH BUDGETS THAT HAVE NINE ZEROS, BUT THE LAWS OF PHYSICS DON'T GIVE A HOOT ABOUT EPAULETS AND BRASS — THEY CHOOSE A FIFTY-DOLLAR MOTOR AND A ROLL OF ELECTRICAL TAPE. This decentralized technology broke the traditional military paradigm into splinters, proving that innovation always finds a way, whether the generals believe in it or not.

IN LIEU OF A MORAL

The whole saga of calculators, PCs, and drones is just a dress rehearsal for what we're going through today.

When some fellow foams at the mouth trying to prove that artificial intelligence will make us forget how to think, just remember the teachers diagnosing calculoholism. When bureaucrats try to regulate neural networks into the ground, remember the Soviet ideologues fighting cybernetics. And when respectable experts TURN UP THEIR NOSES at prompt engineering, remember the top executives terrified of a keyboard.

Technologies change, but human nature, our fears, and our egos remain an absolute constant. We always start out by waging war on the very tools that make us stronger, and only later, when the dust settles, do we claim them as our own.

PART FIVE. THE DIALECTICS OF FEAR AND WHY ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE WILL BECOME INVISIBLE

WELL, HERE WE ARE AT THE END OF OUR HISTORICAL JOURNEY. WE'VE ALREADY SEEN FOR OURSELVES THAT HUMANITY GREETED THE ANCIENT GREEK ALPHABET, THE PRINTING PRESS, THE FIRST STEAM LOCOMOTIVES, AND EVEN THE HARMLESS SCHOOL CALCULATOR WITH THE EXACT SAME HOLY TERROR.

Today, all this centuries-old panic has gathered around artificial intelligence. The internet is once again ringing with WAILS AND LAMENTATIONS: neural networks will steal our jobs, make us forget how to think, enslave humanity, and spark a machine uprising. If you've read this far into part five, you already know the score: we are looking at a textbook, classic historical recursion. We just keep STUBBING OUR TOES ON THE EXACT SAME ROCK of progress, over and over again. But why does this happen? Why does our species, armed with such a mighty intellect, throw a temper tantrum every single time a new tool comes along?

THE GHOST OF HEGEL AND THE QUALITATIVE LEAP

All these fears actually have an ironclad scientific and philosophical backing. Old man Hegel figured out a brilliant law in his dialectics long ago: THE TRANSITION OF QUANTITATIVE CHANGES INTO QUALITATIVE ONES.

How does that work in technology? For decades, engineers tinker and slowly improve the hardware: memory capacity grows, processors get a little faster (those are the quantitative changes). Society gets used to it; it’s comfortable and doesn't cause any stress. But at some point, a critical mass of computing power builds up, A SWITCH FLIPS, and we get a qualitative leap. Boom, out pops ChatGPT or Midjourney.

And this qualitative leap always shatters the old system and causes maximum social stress. Why did the Luddites smash the power looms? Because the qualitative leap (mechanization) turned their seven-year education into worthless scrap. Why were the top executives terrified of a keyboard? Because the qualitative leap (the PC) wrecked the comfortable pecking order of the office. Technophobia isn't a sign of stupidity. It is A PERFECTLY NATURAL DEFENSE MECHANISM OF A SOCIETY THREATENED WITH LOSING ITS INVESTMENTS, ITS STATUS, AND ITS KNOW-HOW.

NORMALIZATION THEORY: HOW TECHNOLOGY GETS BORING

But there is another side to this dialectic of innovation — the grand finale. In sociology, there's a little something called Normalization Process Theory. It states that the absolute highest point of development for any successful technology is TOTAL INVISIBILITY.

Take electricity. Once upon a time, it was a terrifying miracle, a demon living in the wires that made folks seriously consider wearing rubber spacesuits on the street. Today, we only remember electricity exists when the power goes out. It dissolved into the walls of our houses, becoming a DULL, EVERYDAY BACKDROP to our lives. We don't sit around pondering the laws of physics every time we flick a light switch.

Just the same, when I was first starting out in the IT business, mobile service seemed like pure science fiction, and the internet was A PLAYTHING FOR GEEKS. Today, we don't even notice our smartphones; they've practically become an extension of our own arms.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE EVAPORATES

The exact same thing is happening right this very minute with artificial intelligence. This era of panic, flashy presentations, and arguments over whether a robot will steal your job is going to end real soon. AI has already started melting right into the infrastructure.

Pretty soon, we'll stop treating it like a separate entity. Neural networks will become an invisible layer in our phones, cars, traffic lights, and medical gadgets. They'll manage the traffic, diagnose ailments, write routine code, and sort the mail without us ever noticing a thing.

AI will become just as boring, banal, but absolutely vital a utility as indoor plumbing or an electrical outlet. Nobody is going to scream about a machine uprising, just like nobody today screams about a microwave uprising.

A FINAL WORD

Humanity has always been, and always will be, stubborn as a mule. We are lazy, suspicious, and selfish. We will always try to wave a red flag to halt progress, accusing new technologies of mortal sins just to protect our cozy little monopolies on knowledge, money, or power.

But the laws of physics, mathematics, and evolution don't give a hoot about our fears. Whether it's papyrus, a crossbow, a calculator, or a machine learning algorithm — the tool that makes us more efficient always wins the day. And there's only one thing left for us to do: QUIT TILTING AT WINDMILLS, master the new tool before the competition does, and sit back and enjoy watching how what used to be terrifying black magic turns into a dull, but highly profitable, daily routine.