I watched an interview with Ada Palmer. It was engaging throughout its two-hour length, but one idea in particular stayed with me. She argues that what we tend to call “revolutions” of recent decades — the Internet, smartphones, social media, and now LLMs — are really just applications of the only true revolution of my generation: the personal computer, which began emerging in the mid-1970s.
Fifty years in the making, and yet the sense of progress feels surprisingly modest. What many people struggle to grasp is that revolutions are extraordinarily long processes. They often take several generations to produce a meaningful shift in how human beings actually live — what we might call real change, and, we hope, change for the better.
In recent years, however, even the most trivial applications have been marketed as revolutionary. Artificial intelligence is perhaps the clearest example. The term itself already signals the exaggeration: there is little that is truly “intelligent” about it, as anyone who uses it can quickly see. And yet we are told, once again, that the future will never be the same.
Perhaps the only way to make sense of all this is to adopt a bird’s-eye view. It seems to be the only perspective from which the real impact of large-scale historical processes becomes visible. At one point in Sapiens, Harari suggests that after the agricultural revolution, many people must have felt that life had been better before. By then, of course, it was already too late — there is no going back from a revolution.
The only possible response has always been adaptation: each of us trying, in our own limited way, to preserve what makes life worth living. In that sense, perhaps nothing has really changed. And that realization can be oddly grounding — it invites us to downplay the supposed magnitude of any revolution, past, present, or future, no matter how insistently it is sold to us.
The Palmer frame is the strongest part of this — collapsing five decades of “revolutions” into one slow application of the PC is a useful corrective to industry breathlessness. And the closing move toward adaptation as the only honest response works.
But the piece smuggles in a contradiction it doesn’t quite confront. You quote Harari’s agricultural revolution — a shift so profound that people sensed life had been better before, and yet couldn’t reverse it. That’s not a story about overhyped marketing. That’s a story about a revolution being understated in the moment and only legible in retrospect. So which is it? Are we currently overselling trivial applications, or are we possibly under-registering something that will look enormous in two centuries? The bird’s-eye view cuts both ways, and you’ve only used it in one direction.
The line “there is little that is truly ‘intelligent’ about it, as anyone who uses it can quickly see” is the weakest sentence in the essay. It’s the kind of confident dismissal that ages badly — and more importantly, it’s doing rhetorical work your argument doesn’t need. The interesting claim isn’t whether LLMs are “really” intelligent (a definitional swamp). The interesting claim is that even genuinely transformative tools take generations to reshape how people live. You can keep the skepticism without the swipe.
The Sapiens reference also deserves more weight or less. As written, it’s a name-drop that gestures at an idea rather than using it. If the agricultural revolution is the analogy, then the unsettling implication is that adaptation isn’t a noble preservation of “what makes life worth living” — it’s what farmers told themselves while their bodies got smaller and their teeth got worse. Adaptation is sometimes just acquiescence with better PR.
The piece wants to be grounding. But the Harari beat, taken seriously, is the opposite of grounding. It suggests we may already be inside the change and unable to see it — same as the early agriculturalists. Does that bird’s-eye view actually let you off the hook, or does it quietly raise the stakes?
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