AI Is Our Global Nervous System
The Second Current
The tie between electrification and cognification is going to blow your mind and
I spend my days looking at two things:
code
cap tables
When I look at code, I am looking for simple elegance and logic. When I look at cap tables, I am looking for the future. I wouldn’t mind simple, either!
For the last two decades, the future has been about software eating the world. That was the thesis. It was a good thesis. It generated trillions of dollars in value. It moved atoms into bits. It digitized our social lives and our bank accounts.
But lately, the air has changed.
You can feel it in the commit logs and the board meetings. We are no longer just writing software that organizes information. We are building a new substrate for society entirely.
We are witnessing the wide-scale cognification of the human experience.
To understand where we are going, I look back at the only event in human history that compares in magnitude.
I look at electrification.
Most people think of electrification as a singular event. They think Edison flipped a switch and the world lit up. That is not what happened. Electrification was a process. It was a rigorous, messy, capital-intensive layout of a new reality. It took decades.
It did two specific things. First, it decoupled energy from its source. Second, it acted as the fertile soil for the Information Revolution.
We are now running the same playbook. We are decoupling intelligence from the biological brain. This new substrate will not just give us better apps or faster search.
I believe this is going to trigger a Scientific Renaissance and a Societal Renaissance that will make the last fifty years look like a warm-up act.
The Invisible Layer
Walk into any room in the modern world. Look for the outlets. You probably don’t even see them.
They are invisible to you because they are reliable.
You do not think about the coal plant or the solar farm or the nuclear reactor behind them. You do not think about the step-down transformers or the high-voltage transmission lines. You just plug in your laptop. You expect the electrons to be there. You treat energy as an infinite, on-demand utility.
This creates a layer of abstraction. As a software engineer, I love abstractions. They allow us to build complex things on top of simple things without worrying about the details.
Electricity is the ultimate abstraction for physical work.
Before electricity, if you wanted to power a factory, you had to build the factory around a steam engine. There was a massive central drive shaft running down the middle of the building. Leather belts connected every machine to that single shaft.
If the steam engine died, the whole factory died. If you wanted to move a machine, you couldn’t. The physics of the building dictated the workflow.
Electricity changed the topology, the way we organize our work and our home life, the set-up of the entire world. It allowed us to put a small motor in every single machine. We moved from “group drive” to “unit drive.”
Suddenly, you could organize the factory line based on the flow of the product, not the flow of the power. This seems like a minor detail. It is not. This shift is what allowed Henry Ford to invent the assembly line. It is what allowed for mass production. It is what propelled humanity out of the agrarian age and into the industrial age.
We scaled physical capacity. We took the burden of “force” off the backs of humans and horses and put it into the grid.
But electricity did something else. It didn’t just turn motors. It allowed us to manipulate the flow of electrons to represent logic. High voltage is a one. Low voltage is a zero.
Without the stable electric grid, there is no transistor.
Without the transistor, there is no microchip.
Without the chip, there is no internet.
Electrification was the substrate. The Information Revolution was the application running on top of it.
The Cognification of Everything
Now we are building the next layer.
Kevin Kelly famously coined the term “cognification.” I like this word. It implies a process. It implies that we are taking things that are dumb and making them smart.
In the startup world, we talk about “AI.” But “AI” is a vague marketing term. Cognification is a mechanical description of what is actually happening.
We are taking the process of inference and decision-making and turning it into a utility.
Think about the steam engine factory again.
Right now “intelligence” is like that central steam engine. It is trapped in biological brains. It is trapped in expensive experts. It is centralized. If you want a medical diagnosis, you have to go to the doctor. If you want legal advice, you have to go to the lawyer. The intelligence is coupled to the human. SaaS firms and consulting companies are leather belts pulling this expertise to the edge of the factory, to all of us.
AI creates the “unit drive” for intelligence.
We are decoupling the ability to think from the biological constraint of the human mind. We are turning intelligence into an API call.
As an investor, I look for collapsing costs. When the cost of a fundamental resource collapses, demand for that resource goes vertical. This is Jevons paradox. When steam engines became more efficient, we didn’t use less coal. We used more coal because we found new places to use steam engines.
The marginal cost of intelligence is trending toward zero.
What happens when intelligence is free?
We will use AI to negotiate the price of a toaster. We will use AI to optimize the traffic light patterns for a single intersection based on the weather. We will use AI to write a bedtime story that is customized for one specific child on one specific Tuesday.
We are building a grid of cognition. Just as the electric grid delivers potential energy to your wall socket, the cloud is delivering potential intelligence to your device.
This is the new substrate.
The Industrial Revolution allowed us to manipulate atoms at scale. The Information Revolution allowed us to manipulate bits at scale. The Cognitive Revolution will allow us to manipulate patterns and complexity at scale.
This leads us to two distinct outcomes.
The Scientific Renaissance
I am exhausted by the cynicism in the scientific community. There is a prevailing theory called “Eroom’s Law.”
It is Moore’s Law in reverse. It observes that drug discovery is becoming slower and more expensive over time. It suggests that we have picked all the low-hanging fruit of science.
This is a defeatist perspective. It assumes that the toolset of science is static.
The toolset is about to change.
Science is effectively a search problem. You are searching the landscape of possible chemical combinations to find a drug. You are searching the landscape of possible materials to find a better battery cathode.
The problem is that the search space is too big for human brains. It is too big for trial-and-error experimentation. We have reached the limits of intuition.
AI is the telescope for high-dimensional space.
DeepMind’s AlphaFold was the first crack in the dam. For fifty years, biologists struggled to predict how proteins fold. It is a geometry problem of mind-bending complexity. AlphaFold solved it. It didn’t solve it by understanding the physics in a traditional sense. It solved it by learning the patterns of biology.
This is the beginning of a Scientific Renaissance.
I am seeing pitch decks today that look like science fiction. I see companies using large models to simulate nuclear fusion plasma. Controlling plasma is like trying to hold jelly with rubber bands. It requires micro-second adjustments that no human can calculate. AI can.
I see companies using AI to design new enzymes. These enzymes can eat plastic or capture carbon. We are moving from discovering biology to designing biology.
The scientific method itself is being upgraded.
Traditionally, the scientific method is: Hypothesis, Experiment, Conclusion. The bottleneck is the Experiment. Experiments are slow. They are expensive. They happen in the real world.
AI allows us to move the experiment into the simulation. We can run a billion virtual experiments overnight. We then use the real world only to validate the winner.
This compresses the cycle time of innovation.
We will see progress in material science that will unlock the physical technologies we have been dreaming of. We need better superconductors. We need lighter alloys for aerospace. We need more efficient photovoltaics.
These are not physics problems anymore. They are data problems.
When you cognify the scientific process, you stop relying on serendipity. You start relying on compute.
As an investor, this is where I am placing my biggest bets. The software companies of the last era sold ads. The software companies of this era will cure cancer. They will solve the energy crisis. They will build the engines that take us beyond this solar system.
This is not hype. It is the logical conclusion of applying infinite cognitive power to finite physical problems.
The Societal Renaissance
The Scientific Renaissance is about the outer world. The Societal Renaissance is about the inner world.
We have spent the last twenty years drowning in information. The internet gave us access to the sum of human knowledge. But access is not the same as understanding.
I can access a textbook on quantum mechanics right now. That doesn’t mean I can understand it. I can access the raw data of the US budget. That doesn’t mean I can make sense of it.
The Information Age solved the distribution of data. The Cognitive Age will solve the distribution of expertise.
Consider education.
We know that the “two sigma problem” exists. Bloom found that an average student tutored one-on-one performed two standard deviations better than students in a classroom. That is the difference between an average student and a genius.
We never scaled this because we couldn’t afford a human tutor for every child. It was an economic impossibility.
Cognification changes the unit economics of education.
We are about to deploy an infinite supply of patient, knowledgeable, and personalized tutors. A child in a remote village will have access to an Aristotelian level of instruction. The AI will know their learning style. It will know when they are bored. It will explain a concept ten different ways until it clicks.
We are going to raise the global baseline of human capability.
This applies to creativity as well.
There is a gatekeeping mechanism in creativity. It is called “technical skill.” You might have a symphony in your head, but if you cannot play the violin, it stays in your head. You might have a vision for a video game, but if you cannot write C++, it never gets made.
Generative AI destroys this barrier. It separates the idea from the execution.
If you can describe it, you can build it.
Critics worry that this will make us lazy. They worry that AI will replace human artists. I take the opposite view. I think it will unlock a flood of human expression.
When you lower the friction of creation, you get more creation.
The printing press didn’t kill storytelling. It industrialized it. It gave us the novel. The camera didn’t kill painting. It freed painting from the need to be realistic. It gave us Impressionism and Cubism.
AI acts as a force multiplier for the human imagination.
This creates a Societal Renaissance because it democratizes agency. In the old world, you needed a corporation to build a product. You needed a team to ship software. You needed a studio to make a movie.
In the cognified world, individuals become entities. A single person with a vision and an AI agent can do the work of fifty people. AI brought me from barely a 1x software engineer to multiples of that. Someone saw a project I’ve been working on recently and asked me “how did you make that”?
He knows what I am capable of, and this is beyond it.
We are moving away from the “Company Man” era. We are moving toward a new era of the artisan. But these artisans will wield the power of industrial conglomerates.
The friction of modern life is often just a lack of intelligence in the system. Bureaucracy is a lack of intelligence. Traffic is a lack of intelligence. Supply chain shortages are a lack of intelligence.
When we inject cognition into these systems, the friction disappears. Life becomes smoother. It becomes more responsive.
The New Grid
I sit in meetings with founders who are worried about the current state of AI. They worry about hallucinations. They worry about context windows. They worry about GPU shortages.
I tell them to zoom out.
We are in the early days of electrification. We are still figuring out AC vs DC. The wires are still sparking. The bulbs burn out too fast.
But the grid is being laid.
The infrastructure of the 21st century is not roads and bridges. It is data centers and fiber optics. It is the physical housing for the cognitive substrate.
Electrification took us from the farm to the factory. It gave us the lightbulb and the radio. It set the table for everything we know today.
Cognification is taking us from the factory to the laboratory. It is taking us from the office to the studio.
It is the substrate for a world where scientific breakthroughs are a daily occurrence. It is the substrate for a world where every human being has the support structure they need to maximize their potential.
We are not just building chatbots. We are not just building better search engines.
We are wiring the nervous system of a new civilization.
As an investor, I am betting on this planetary cognification. As an engineer, I am ready to build on it.
The switch flipped a long time ago.
The hum is getting louder now.
We are wiring up the autonomous information harness around our planet that will accelerate humanity faster and deeper into the Singularity.
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