Steam, Steel, and Infinite Minds

The post frames AI as a new miracle material that can define an era, like steel in the Gilded Age and semiconductors in the Digital Age. It uses historical analogies to argue that current AI chatbots are only an early phase, still shaped by older workflows and interfaces.

Reading notes

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• AI is presented as the next era-defining material, comparable to steel and semiconductors.
• Early AI products often imitate older tools, just as early phones and movies resembled telegrams and stage plays.
• For individual knowledge workers, coding agents suggest a shift from manual work to managing multiple AI agents.
• General knowledge work is harder because context is fragmented across many tools and because quality is harder to verify than code.
• Human involvement is still needed, but the goal is supervision from leverage rather than constant manual participation.
• Organizations today still rely on human communication systems that do not scale well.
• AI is compared to steel because it could hold context across workflows and reduce the burden on human communication.
• AI is compared to steam because companies are currently only bolting new tools onto old structures instead of redesigning around the new capability.
• At Notion, the author says more than 700 agents already handle repetitive tasks alongside about 1,000 employees.
• At the economy level, AI may push knowledge work toward larger, faster, less legible systems, similar to how steel, steam, railways, and elevators changed cities.