There’s a disclaimer you see everywhere in investment materials:
“Past performance is not indicative of future results.”
It protects against pattern-matching gone wrong - that is the assumption that tomorrow will look like yesterday because yesterday’s data was consistent.
In tech we don’t have such a disclaimer. But we might well need one. Because as AI increasingly takes hold, the pundits are taking to referencing history:
“The printing press in the 1440s freed information.”
.. it went from scarce and controlled to everywhere. The Catholic Church wasn’t happy. Wars were fought. But society restructured around it. Literacy exploded. New professions emerged. The world absorbed it.
**They forget to mention the timescale. **The press was invented, then the first Bible printed 15 years later. Another 50 years to spread across just Europe. A full 160 years before it finally fuelled the Reformation.
During the Industrial Revolution around the 17th to 18th century - people moved from farms to factories. Labour patterns inverted. Social structures shattered and rebuilt. Real upheaval. But wages eventually rose. Living standards improved. The world kept going.
History reminds us that the steam engine first appeared in 1712 with another 40 years passing before James Watt refines it for rotary power and another 50 years to get to the first steam locomotive.
Well - how about electricity - it arrived in the late 19th century, transforming production, communication, daily life simultaneously. Changed when people worked, how they lived, what was possible. Massive disruption. Fundamental restructuring. But humans found new equilibrium. The world was okay.
Again. Timescale … 40 years from Faraday’s dynamo to the first light bulb. The first power station served 60 customers. A full 70 years passed before the first 50 per cent of America was electrified.
So wheb the pundits say: this AI stuff. We’ve been through it all before. We’ll be fine. We’ll be resilient.
Suddenly that disclaimer rears its head.
Because this time it is different.
Faster – Previous disruptions took generations to fully absorb. This one is compressing years into months.
Affects everyone – The printing press needed readers. Factories needed workers. Electricity needed infrastructure. AI doesn’t require permission or literacy and it’s already everywhere.
Global – There’s no frontier to escape to. No place where the old rules still apply. No opt-out.
It learns from us. Then from itself. – The printing press was static. A combine harvester does one thing. But this? It learns from what you feed it, then uses that to improve itself, then learns from those improvements. The loop closes. The tool gets smarter while you’re still figuring out how to use it.
Nobody actually knows how it works. – You can understand a printing press. You can understand a combine harvester. Even the people building those things grasped the mechanics. But AI? Not even the engineers building it can fully explain why it makes the decisions it makes. You’re delegating thinking to something you don’t understand.
It’s adaptive. – Every other technology was fundamentally the same yesterday as today. This one changes. Morphs. Responds. You can’t treat it as a fixed tool because it isn’t.