Episode 159: Historical Tech Disruptions and AI Parallels

Hello everybody, this is Exponential Wisdom and this is such a great treat for both of us because I love history and Peter thinks human history started with Google.

So, well, wait, wait, wait, it didn't?

So we uniquely have our own realm. Anyway, so we're going to be talking about the overall Impact of Exponential Technology, and I try to show that there's a wisdom that things happened previously in history. And I've been searching ever since ChatGPT came out and everything that's happened since ChatGPT. I think it was November 30th, 2023.

Yes.

I've never seen such a sudden change. I mean, in my entire lifetime, I've never seen— of all the technologies I've grown up with since the 1940s, this is by far the most pervasive, most comprehensive, and the fastest technological change that I've ever seen. And I was trying to find someplace in the history books whether there was any comparable thing which not only changed how people do things, but it changed how people think about things. And I think the big breakthroughs are a change in thinking.

Mm.

And I found it.

Tell me, what did you find? 'Cause I've got my own pet versions of that.

Yeah.

And I'd love to compare notes here. I think it'd be a fun conversation 'cause I do believe history gives us some handle on how to deal with the future.

Yeah, it's the introduction of zero into European culture.

Huh, when did that happen? What year was this?

Well, as far as I can tell, it's around 1270, 1280, and it's in one place, it's in Sicily, which was this remarkable, economic center right in the middle of the Mediterranean. And you had North African culture, you had Italian culture, you even had Northern European. The Normans came in and they immediately adapted. And you had Greek culture. So there were all these mixtures of cultures and it was a very tolerant society.

Hmm.

It happened in the marketplace and it had to do with calculation. And up until At that point in Europe, they were using the Roman numeral system. And if you've ever tried to do quick math with Roman numerals, you just can't do it.

Huh.

And what they noticed, the Arab traders came in and they could just do things in their head in a matter of seconds. And it just completely disrupted. And immediately the Sicilians created whole schools where they were teaching the children how to do zero plus the 9 numbers that came before that. It just utterly transformed European society, disrupted it first of all, and then it transformed it. And I was looking for something that wasn't a thing, it wasn't like a technology, it was a new thought that did it. And I think zero is the closest we have to what AI is doing right now.

Wow.

And it was forbidden, by the way, the whole idea of zero, that nothing could be something was heresy. And the church ran everything. The Catholic Church was the dominant power. They fought against it and, you know, all the things that we're seeing now with AI. Even the Pope just came out with an encyclical.

I saw that. I wanna read that.

We have to regulate this. It can't just be out there doing what it wants to do and you can't have people just doing anything with it. We have to have control of this. So it was the Pope back then as the Pope today. So some things repeat.

Well, you know, I think that is critically important, and I haven't thought about that. I'll give you my list, and I'd love to talk about them as well. Yeah, I would say spoken language. Yeah, was a biggie. Fire.

Fire was the biggest. I think fire was the biggest before language. You think so? Yeah, yeah.

I would add to the list the written language, writing. So language first, spoken language, writing, And then the alphabet. Sure. You know, we've got the printing press, electricity. You know, in recent history, I think electricity has been one of the biggest things that transformed everything.

There's a great section on AI in today's Wall Street Journal. And they were talking about almost no electricians in 1920 and 80,000 electricians in 2030.

So yeah, just to put some numbers on electricity, Edison's light bulb arrived in the late 1800s.— like 1880, thereabouts. And what was interesting was— we were talking about this in my Moonshots podcast— that Anthropic in the first quarter of 2026 was expecting 10x growth, which is amazing, the idea you have 10x growth in a quarter. And it got 80x growth in that quarter.

Mm-hmm.

And what was most interesting was it wasn't— the growth that we saw in Claude and Anthropic wasn't due to due to more users. It was due to users finding more ways to use the technology. And I think that's an interesting analogy for electricity, 'cause when electricity first came online, it was mostly used for incandescent light bulbs, like replacing candles and oil lamps for lighting. And then, you know, this idea of an electric light bulb came in, and then all of a sudden they started finding other uses for electricity, you know, electrifying the factory floor and— Yeah. Everything from elevators to washing machines. And it was just more and more uses of electricity and, you know, the telegraph, the telephone, the radio, the computer, ultimately all of these things. So I love this idea of a technology that once it's introduced, the adjacent uses of it are super impactful.

One of the things I've been looking at, there was a very interesting book, 1980, I think it came out. It was called "The Technological System" by a French sociologist by the name of Jacques And he was totally against technology. He was a professor, so that's—

He's not alive now.

He made an interesting statement right at the beginning of the book. He said, you know, up until now, countries had technologies. The French had technology, the Germans had technology, everybody had technology. So the technologies were in the countries and they were different technologies. And he says, we've reached the point now where all the countries are inside the technology.

Huh. What do you make of that?

Something that's happened within the last 30, 40 years is the internet. So all countries are now using the internet to do whatever they were doing before. When what's his name who created Intel?

Oh, Gordon Moore.

Gordon Moore. I saw an interview late in his life. And he said, well, it's not actually a law. He said, I just noticed the first time we created an integrated circuit and then 18 months later, 2 years later, it was twice the computing and it was half the price. And then a third one happened. And he said, gee, I wonder how long this could go. He said, I wasn't trying to create a law. I just said, this is an interesting phenomenon. And he said, I don't think it's about technology. He says, I think it's about human aspiration.

Hmm.

He says, "I gave them a measurement and everybody tried to make the measurement actually happen." Fascinating, right?

The best way to predict the future is create it.

Create a measurement for measuring the future, yeah. And then I don't even think it applies today. I think it's much faster now.

No, it is. We've gone from a doubling every, you know, arguably 18 to 24 months to today we're seeing somewhere between 10x and 100x per year It's not just the integrated circuit anymore, right? You can think of it as the power of AI because of GPUs increasing in capability and the algorithms and everything surrounding it that's driving this increased capability.

Peter, we met in 2011 because of your book, Abundance.

Yes.

We had conversations. First of all, we had an event that got put together.

Yeah, at Singularity University. Yeah.

Yeah, and I said to you when we were talking about the possibility of A360, and I said, you know, the one thing you have going for you, you're not afraid of the future. Everybody's afraid of the future.

I will never forget those words, pal. You changed my life, and thank you. All the coach members out there along with myself appreciate you for the instigation. You're an instigator.

Beautiful form. Yeah, and then you said, well, if we had a program, what should be the curriculum or the agenda? What's on your agenda? And I said, everything you're excited about.

I will never forget that. Yeah, you've taught me well. You've been a mentor for me and I'm grateful for you. Yeah, you said just do what you love doing. Like let your curiosity and your passion drive the content.

And we'll put butts in seats and we'll see how it lands.

Changed my life.

But if you go back to 2011, you know, AI's been around a long time before it became available to consumers.

Yes.

You know, I mean, it's been around for a long time since Turing really, And my question is, what has surprised you most about when it became available to individuals?

I think what surprised me is two things. One is obviously how fast, it was the fastest moving technology adoption curve of anything. And then related to that is the amount of capital that's flown into it. We will see by the end of 2026, a trillion dollars has flown into AI and AI-related investments more than the railroads, more than the Apollo program, more than the nuclear program. And so the amount of capital flow has been staggering. And then the last thing that surprised me is how— I don't wanna say inefficiently or how little, but that the general public is not using it as much as they possibly could, that people are self-limiting their use of AI, you know, because ultimately you can and should use AI to help re-engineer your business, help you solve any problems. People are not asking the level of questions that they could that could give them benefit. And then the final thing is, you know, you probably saw this. Mm-hmm. Where Eric Schmidt was booed off stage, that the negative reaction that people are having to AI right now.

Yeah. Yeah, I saw a YouTube video and there was a speaker, it was a commencement speaker, and he started reading from his papers and he says, "Now, isn't this boring? How many of you find what I just said boring?" And he said it was written with AI. So he tore up and the whole audience clapped he was doing it. And I said, yeah, yeah, well, it's interesting entertainment, but you're not personalizing this. I think you have to personalize it. It doesn't matter what the world is doing with AI. What are you doing with AI?

Yeah, for sure. You know, I wanna go back to your point you made about analogous breakthroughs. You know, AI today, large language models are, based on written language. They're based on predicting what you're gonna say next. And large language models are only possible because of the amount of stuff we humans have written down.

And digitally recorded.

Digitally recorded. And, you know, a lot of the AI companies out there have actually scanned books to upload stuff that isn't digitally recorded. You know, they literally have torn the pages out and scanned them and uploaded them. And if you go back to writing, which is really memory outside the brain. Mm-hmm. The first writing came online in Mesopotamia back around 3,000 years ago. It was in Sumerian script.

Yeah.

And the ability to have permanent memory, right? 'Cause up until then, people don't realize everything was handed down through story and your ability to tell great stories and to memorize the stories and become sort of— there were individuals who were the, containers and purveyors of story. But then when you had permanent memory, you know, you could write down knowledge and laws. And like you just said, with zero, commerce began because you could write down a person's debts and trade records. And then came, of course, bureaucracy and governance on top of that. But the speed of change— and Ray talks about Moore's Law only holds for the integrated circuit. Circa 1957 through recent history. But Ray talks about the law of accelerating returns, which predates that. And writing was one of the technologies that enabled this exponential growth thousands of years ago. As we accumulated knowledge, we would then accumulate the next layer and build on it and build on it.

Well, what about people you know in the technology world, the ones pouring the capital in? Have they been surprised? Shocked.

Shocked. Shocked. I interviewed Elon over the Christmas holidays, and then my Moonshots podcast with him came out in early January. And he said, to paraphrase him, he said something like, you know, I'm on the playing field, right? I'm creating this stuff, and I'll have these moments of like, wow. And then the next day, more wow, right? I said exponential wow. And the capabilities of the AIs today was not something that was predicted. And it really is the combination of more data, more parameters, more compute is leading to capabilities. And so one of the questions is, how far can this go?

Right.

Are these AIs conscious? Can they be conscious? Is there any difference from our perception of consciousness and our perception that they're conscious, will they be able to have fundamental breakthroughs?

Independent of us.

Independent of us, right? And so recently we just saw OpenAI and now just Google solving mathematical problems that no human has been capable of solving. And so I wrote a paper called Solve Everything. People can see it at solveeverything.org. With Alex Wiesner-Gross, we talk about the notion that in the next 5 years, 7, 8 at the utmost, we're likely to be in a situation where AI will enable us to solve any and all problems. You know, first math, then physics, then chemistry, then biology, material sciences. You know, people think about the incredible wealth being created by AI today as it's adopted by companies for coding, and for running their companies and so forth. But I think the most extraordinary wealth that's going to be created by these are gonna come from the scientific breakthroughs, like room temperature superconducting or age reversal drugs that are discovered by these systems. Humans directing them, at least for the near term. But yeah, incredible.

Yeah. One of the things that is very clear to me, just for my own client base, because all my entrepreneurs, a couple thousand entrepreneurs who are in strategic coaching, They're all using it for something.

Yes.

And the other thing is where it relates directly to the creativity and productivity of your company. How many of you are happy? And all of them raised their hands, you know, and I said, but how many of them, they're just accelerating the direction that you were already going in before that? And they said, yeah, absolutely. 'Cause in coach, we have the concept of unique ability, you know, which is the center of strategic coach that everybody's got a unique ability. Your brain doesn't operate the way other people's brain operates. And the big thing is to be using your brain where it gives you the most personal energy and ambition. But the other thing, it makes you incredibly more valuable to your clients and customers. I said, as an entrepreneur, those are the boxes you have to check if something is really new and great. And I said, no question about it.

So let's talk about the places that people are not using AI, because I think that's equally important. So doing what you do cheaper, faster, more efficiently in your lane is great. But I think what AI can also enable you to do is find the adjacent businesses that you could enter, right? So Amazon obviously began as a bookstore. And then as the everything store. But the majority of its capital right now, its revenues and profits are coming from AWS. The fact that they had built large web services for their own use and started renting it out. And the realization, I think, for all entrepreneurs is the business that you're in is the business you're in today.

Mm-hmm.

Doesn't need to be the business you're gonna be in tomorrow or 5 or 10 years from now. But how do you discover those businesses? I tell people, listen, you can easily upload all the information about your company. Like, this is our customers, this is our product, our service, you know, here's our website, here's the comments from our customers, all of these things. First of all, who's likely to disrupt us and how, right? And then what's adjacent businesses that we could move into that would be even more profitable? And the questions you can ask that I'm amazed people don't do. is say, okay, upload all of your information about your business, describe it fully to the AI model, and then say, okay, where would Elon Musk take our business next? Or where would Steve Jobs take it? You know, one of the things that's so true is we're limited by how we individually think. We replay our gameplays all the time. We sometimes don't go outside of our lane. We're also limited by our executive team around us. You're at a board meeting, you're in an executive meeting, you say, okay, Listen, this product line is being disrupted. Where should we go next? And you ask them, but what you really should be doing is asking the large language models, and you can ask questions that could never have been answered before and get reasonably good answers. I mean, do you think about that?

Oh yeah. Where our program has gone, it's all collaboration between people who were previously your competitors.

Yeah.

In other words, the two of you are masterful in a particular area, but the big test is who are you doing it for? And if you're doing something for a customer and they're doing something for a customer, it's different. Why not combine the two things to create an entirely new model?

The Reese's Peanut Butter Cup business model.

Yeah, yeah. It's only your lack of thinking that's preventing you from having collaborations with any number of people.

Yes.

I mean, just to give you an example, You've been doing podcasts since podcasts came out, but the real breakthrough was the Moonshot Podcast because you're putting 4 people together on the same program, and then you're mixing and matching, you're bringing new people in.

And the energy is different. Yeah, yeah. It was a product market fit, right? It was like Moonshots as a podcast was going along well, but then when I brought Saleem and Alex Wiesner-Gross and Dave Erickson on, It was a brand new magic and we turned it into a weekly show, actually now twice a week, on the breakthroughs going on in AI, chips, data centers, energy space. It's become so much fun and our viewership has gone through the sky.

Well, it's improv too.

It's improv, yes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Pretty cool. Yes, the greatest thing is improv is the ticket today, is that it's being created in, the actual experience, the new ideas, the new connections are actually being corrected. I mean—

Which is what you and I do right now.

Yeah, we're famous for not allowing preparation undermine performance.

That's so perfect. Yeah, for those listening, you know, Dan and I get on this show, it's like, okay, Dan, you go first, you kick off the first subject, and we have these conversations and they're beautiful. I love the fact that you bring your wisdom and your historical insights to the table?

Yeah, the big area has really become what I would say control systems because control systems are essentially, you know, when I think of control system, think of top-down government as opposed to up from the bottom government. You know, I was watching a couple YouTube videos about China and AI and I said, yeah, but they have a top-down model. You know, it starts with one person, then it goes. And I said, the thing that's happening with AI in the United States, there's millions of people who are determining the new rules, the new uses. It's not controlled by any government. I created a little book about 2 years ago, and it's called The Geometry of Staying Cool and Calm. I said, the problem today is that if you think change is disruptive now, you have no idea what's— Mm-hmm.

—forward.

So there's 3 rules that you have to adapt. One is everything's made up.

Yes.

Everything that's ever existed was made up by someone at some point. And we consider it, well, this is the way things are. I says, no, no, it was just made up. The second one is nobody's in charge of the making up.

Love that.

And the third one is life's not fair.

Yep.

If you get comfortable with those 3 rules, you're not gonna have any trouble with change.

Hmm. Yeah, the only constant is change, and the speed of change is accelerating.

Mm-hmm.

And I think, you know, along those lines, agility and agency are the two most important words in my vocabulary right now. How do you have agility as your business is changing? And how do you have agency where you feel all of these technologies and these capabilities are not happening to you, but are happening for you. I'm curious, Dan, what you think about this. My observation is that most people self-limit their use of technology.

And that includes you and me.

Includes you and me, absolutely. It was very funny 'cause I've started taking all of my Zooms, all of my video conversations, and my AI, we've talked about this, is Skippy. It's an OpenClaw on top of two Mac Studios. And I've given Skippy access to everything— my emails, my WhatsApp, my iMessage, my granola recordings. And so it knows everything about me. I'm now able to ask it questions that pull in all of this knowledge. I had a conversation with my physician. I was changing my pill pack formulation and trying to reduce from 80 pills per day or 90 pills per day down to like 35 or 40 pills per day. She sent me an Excel sheet of my past pill pack stuff, and then we talked about it, and she made some marks on the Excel sheet. And I said it was a bloody mess, I wanted to clean it up. And I was about to go and start deleting and copying and pasting on the Excel sheet. And I said, "No, no, no, no, what am I doing?" [LAUGHTER] And I sent Skippy the old Excel and a copy of the conversation I just had with my doctor. And I said, "Please create a cleaned up version of this." And it did it perfectly.

Oh yeah.

In no time.

Mm-hmm.

Rather than me spending an hour.

An hour. It wouldn't have been an hour.

You know, maybe more than that. But rather than doing, you know, you have who, not how. I think there's an equivalent version of that. And you gotta come up with it. Help me come up with acute phraseology for it. But it's like, don't do, prompt.

Mm-hmm.

Right? Because a lot of the things you're about to spend a lot of time doing, could easily be done by your AI more efficiently and actually higher quality than you doing it.

Yeah. You're talking about the self-limiting beliefs. The number one self-limiting belief is who you think you are.

Yeah, I agree with that.

In other words, I'm the sort of person who does this and this and this. And I said, well, maybe you're to use your two phrases, maybe who you are is someone who's incredibly agile and has agency.

Sure.

Maybe that's who you are. Yeah, but what about where I went to college? Yeah, that was an interesting experience. So what about when you went to college? You know, and I did this and this and this. And I said, well, build that in too. Add that to the mix and see what AI does with it.

I tend to let go of the past very easily, especially in marital relationship or with friends. It's like, if you're holding onto the past too tightly, you're limiting yourself—

Yeah.

—versus being open to infinite futures ahead of you. The other thing, and I just said to my team, I wanna have a conversation on this, in some of our businesses, our scope and our scale of what we believe the business could be is again limited by a linear extrapolation typically versus, okay, what would it take to make this business 10 times bigger or 100 times more impactful? And you have to be willing to experiment with crazy ideas to get there.

Mm-hmm. The other thing, there's a great book by a scientist by the name of Joe Henrich. He's fully tenured at 4 different universities. At the same time. And he's an anthropologist, aeronautical engineer.

That's a strange combination.

Yeah, yeah. He said, why are humans the top species? You know, as far as we know, we're the top species. He says, we're not the strongest. We're not the one that can run the fastest. We can find another species that does anything that we do better, except we have the ability to take our brain and combine it with another person's brain. And produce something entirely new.

Yes.

Well, it seems to me AI, we've been searching for this ability. How do we do that? But we had to do it manually up until November. Well, we've had the telephone and we've had lots of technologies, but this seems the one that goes right to the heart of the matter. How do you access other people's brain easily and productively?

Hmm. Yep.

'Cause large language models is everything that everybody has thought about.

You know, one of the most interesting experiments along that line, Stan, that I had a conversation with one of my Abundance members, she had just filed a patent and she said, how could I use this patent in this other industry? And of course, AI can do that beautifully. You can in fact pick 3 different patents, upload them into an AI and say, what business can I create out of these 3 patents? It's a magical period of creative thinking that's now possible. Yeah. A fun conversation, pal. I know we're at the end of our time here.

Yeah. I'll send you a little essay I wrote on the importance of zero and its relationship to AI. I'll send it to you and you can share it.

Please. I appreciate that. People don't think about zero. We take it so for granted as a concept. Anyway, as always, a pleasure.

Thank you.