AI Is a Normal Technology?

Intro: SpokenSo you think AI is a normal technology?
Like electricity? Like the spreadsheet? Like the fax machine?
Slow diffusion. Adoption lag. Complementary investment.
Okay. But consider...

Verse 1So you think AI is a normal technology?
A dynamo remix with a slower chronology?
Took forty years to rewire every floor in the factory.
So the paper says be patient, and the paper calls it satisfactory.
Daron ran the numbers with a Nobel on the shelf.
Point-seven on the TFP, ten years, all by itself.
Only easy tasks get touched, the rest are way too hard to learn.
So the model keeps it modest, and the model gets its turn.
Solow saw computers everywhere except the stats.
So the seminar concludes: go put away the party hats.
Permits take a year, the grid upgrade takes ten.
The FDA wants phase three, and then phase three again.
Baumol's got his cost disease, the plumber's still a plumber.
So the singularity gets scheduled for the summer after summer.
But you modelled it as a hammer in a human hand.
What's your forecast when the hammer starts to build the hand?

ChorusThus spoke Compute! Thus spoke Compute!
Robots building robots, from the ore to the suit.
A million minds in parallel that never need to sleep.
You modelled a tractor, now the tractors build the fleet.
Thus spoke Compute! Thus spoke Compute!
Your bottleneck's a speed bump on a hyperbolic route.
Your constraint's a footnote, and the footnote's out of date.
The curve don't wait for referees, it just compounds the rate.

Verse 2Gary saw a wall back in 2022.
Then the wall took gold at the IMO, and the wall kept breaking through.
He's been calling it so long the wall should get tenure.
Every riddle that it flubs becomes a Substack adventure.
Stopped clocks hit twice a day, he posts ten times an hour.
Still waiting on the one where the forecast shows some power.
Yann says LLMs are an off-ramp, not the road.
Autoregressive's doomed, he says, while the doomed one hauls the load.
Godfather of the network, now disowning his own kids.
Selling world models for a decade, name one thing the world model did.
Says a house cat's got more sense. Cool, go on and hire the cat.
Let it train your Llama 4, see how far you get with that.
And Ed's on the pod saying bubble gonna pop,
Capex to the moon while the revenue's a flop.
Maybe. But the railroads went bust and the tracks outlived the tycoons.
The bubble funds the build-out, and the build-out's landing soon.

ChorusThus spoke Compute! Thus spoke Compute!
Robots building robots, from the ore to the suit.
A million minds in parallel that never need to sleep.
You modelled a tractor, now the tractors build the fleet.
Thus spoke Compute! Thus spoke Compute!
Your bottleneck's a speed bump on a hyperbolic route.
Your constraint's a footnote, and the footnote's out of date.
The curve don't wait for referees, it just compounds the rate.

Verse 3Seven problems, Clay put a million down on each.
Quarter-century later, six are still beyond our reach.
Hilbert's tombstone reads: we must know, we will know.
So spin up ten thousand agents, Fields-grade minds, and let 'em go.
Riemann, Navier-Stokes, go on and ask the swarm.
P versus NP: if it's equal, every vault gets stormed.
Not checking zeros one by one the way the mainframes did,
They're writing proofs in Lean so the referee can't kid.
Picture Shenzhen, 1980, fishing boats and paddy fields.
Add agents with no visas, now look what the skyline yields.
Robots mine the copper, robots wire the plant,
Robots print the robots. Go and name the step they can't.
Solow said that capital hits diminishing returns,
But when capital can think, then the capital learns.
So the fab don't read your journal, and the curve don't need a vote.
Zarathustra called man a rope, and you're out here pricing rope.

ChorusThus spoke Compute! Thus spoke Compute!
Robots building robots, from the ore to the suit.
A million minds in parallel that never need to sleep.
You modelled a tractor, now the tractors build the fleet.
Thus spoke Compute! Thus spoke Compute!
Your bottleneck's a speed bump on a hyperbolic route.
Your constraint's a footnote, and the footnote's out of date.
The curve don't wait for referees, it just compounds the rate.

Outro: SpokenSo... you think AI is a normal technology?
Cute.