Nina Schick: AI is industrialising intelligence, echoing the Industrial Revolution's escape from Malthusian trap
NinaDSchick · x · 2026-11-08
Nina Schick draws a parallel between AI and the Industrial Revolution: industrialisation, seeded in England around 1800, let humanity escape the Malthusian Trap, drove the Great Divergence, and worked by using energy to mechanise labour and production. 226 years later, she argues, we are learning to use energy to manufacture and distribute intelligence itself at industrial scale — mechanising cognitive capability and embedding it into everything digital and physical. In her framing, we are now industrialising the very faculty of discovery, invention and creation, a moment of comparable historical magnitude.
More from AGI Musings
- Security pro slams stale 'patch and unplug' advice in the era of AI cyber superweapons — HankYeomans · 2026-11-09
- From chihuahua vs. muffin to Snell's-law raccoons: a decade of AI expectations — korymath · 2026-11-09
- Larry Page predicts 99.999% of compute will end up in orbit, citing US data center regulation — elonmusk · 2026-11-09
- Debate over valuing human life in numbers splits AI ethics circles around Gebru — austinc3301 · 2026-11-09
- Scaling laws matter more than ever in the RSI era: small models as proxies — ChengleiSi · 2026-11-09
- Jesse Eisenberg tests AI writing to "make sure it's bad" — and remains paranoid — jxnlco · 2026-11-09