AI is the fastest-adopted technology in human history. ChatGPT hit 900 million weekly users in under three years. Nearly 40% of American adults now use generative AI regularly, a penetration rate the internet took half a decade to achieve and the personal computer needed more than a decade to match. And yet, Goldman Sachs reported in March 2026 that AI has contributed essentially nothing to economy-wide productivity growth. The number they put on it was 0.1 to 0.2 percentage points, which is...

You launch an AI agent on a Tuesday evening and go to bed. While you sleep, the agent runs eighty experiments on the code that built it, keeps the improvements, discards the failures, and starts again. By Wednesday morning, it has found optimizations you missed for months. You open the log and read the night's work. Somewhere around experiment sixty, the agent stopped tweaking and started redesigning. The architecture it produced is better than yours. It is also better than the architecture...

Communication technology has been the single greatest amplifier of human cognitive capability across history — not by making individual brains larger, but by connecting them. Each breakthrough, from writing to AI, expanded the "collective brain" and drove measurable gains in literacy, education, scientific output, and even raw IQ scores. The Flynn Effect documents a ~3-point IQ gain per decade through the 20th century, while global literacy surged from ~12% in 1820 to ~87% in 2020, and the...