LLM scaling framed as industrial revolution 2.0: turning fuel and power into cognitive labor

menhguin · x · 2026-10-16

The author frames LLM scaling laws as an extension of the industrial revolution: instead of human labor, you pour in water, fuel and electricity, and it converts into cognitive labor.

Scaling abundant raw commodities into high-value intellectual work would be a step change beyond individual productivity — comparable to the printing press mass-disseminating intellectual output.

Combined with his earlier point that complex engineering has always been bottlenecked by human attention, the thread argues scaling is turning intellectual labor into a mass-producible commodity.

Related event: Developers See LLMs Breaking the Human Bottleneck in Engineering(2 posts)→

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