[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":258},["ShallowReactive",2],{"writing-\u002Fwriting\u002Fai-is-a-platform-shift":3},{"id":4,"title":5,"body":6,"date":249,"description":250,"extension":251,"meta":252,"navigation":253,"path":254,"seo":255,"stem":256,"__hash__":257},"writing\u002Fwriting\u002F20260420.ai-is-a-platform-shift.md","AI Is a Platform Shift. Act Like It.",{"type":7,"value":8,"toc":239},"minimark",[9,13,26,29,32,35,40,43,51,63,72,75,79,82,93,102,105,108,117,128,132,135,138,141,145,148,155,158,164,168,171,174,177,180,182,185,188,197,200,202,206],[10,11,12],"p",{},"I have this thought sometimes that unsettles me. What if I'm standing inside one of the biggest career opportunities of my lifetime and still treating it like background noise?",[14,15,16,17,16,22],"figure",{},"\n  ",[18,19],"img",{"src":20,"alt":21},"\u002Fwriting\u002F20260420.ai-is-a-platform-shift\u002Fhero.webp","AI Is a Platform Shift.",[23,24,25],"figcaption",{},"I'm already here. I don't want to be the person who stood still anyway.",[10,27,28],{},"That's what AI feels like to me right now. And what makes it hard to shake: I already work in AI. I see the releases, the products, the model updates, the whole thing up close. And I've spent stretches of that time feeling like a very informed bystander.",[10,30,31],{},"So drifting through this half-awake is just a mistake. The specific kind where you're close enough to see what's happening and still don't move.",[33,34],"hr",{},[36,37,39],"h2",{"id":38},"the-pattern-is-real-even-if-the-details-differ","The pattern is real, even if the details differ",[10,41,42],{},"Every few decades, a new general-purpose technology appears and reorganizes everything around it. Electricity. The internal combustion engine. The computer. The internet.",[10,44,45,46,50],{},"Economists Timothy Bresnahan and Manuel Trajtenberg coined the term \"general-purpose technologies\" in a 1995 paper ",[47,48],"content-cite",{"n":49},"1"," to describe exactly these kinds of innovations: ones that improve over time, spread across sectors, and unlock a cascade of complementary innovations. The acronym, GPT, has since been hijacked by ChatGPT (which is, fittingly, also a general-purpose technology).",[10,52,53,54,58,59,62],{},"What makes these shifts so disorienting from the inside is that the value creation happens in stages. Carlota Perez, in ",[55,56,57],"em",{},"Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital"," ",[47,60],{"n":61},"2",", describes two distinct phases: an installation phase, where the technology gets built out and financial capital piles in (this is where you get bubbles), followed by a deployment phase, where it embeds into the real economy and productive capital takes over. The installation phase is loud and full of bad bets. The deployment phase is where most of the actual wealth gets made. I find this framing more useful than most, because it tells you where you are, not what to feel.",[14,64,16,65,16,69],{},[18,66],{"src":67,"alt":68},"\u002Fwriting\u002F20260420.ai-is-a-platform-shift\u002Fperez-phases.webp","Chart illustrating Carlota Perez's two-phase model.",[23,70,71],{},"Perez's Two-Phase Model. Speculative investment peaks and crashes through the installation phase. Real productive value lags, then accumulates through deployment, after the crash, when most people have already looked away.",[10,73,74],{},"The dot-com bubble fits this model almost exactly. The late 1990s were frenzied, stuffed with companies that couldn't survive contact with reality. But the internet was still real. Amazon, Google, and others built during and after the crash, into the deployment phase, when the infrastructure was already laid. The hype and the real opportunity coexisted.",[36,76,78],{"id":77},"why-smart-people-misread-this-moment","Why smart people misread this moment",[10,80,81],{},"There's a specific failure mode I keep seeing among technically literate people. They can identify what's weak: the shallow demos, the inflated valuations, the companies that raised too much for too little. And from that, they draw the wrong conclusion: that they still have time.",[10,83,84,85,88,89,92],{},"Amara put it plainly: \"We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate it in the long run.\" ",[47,86],{"n":87},"3"," Everyone quotes the first half. Almost nobody internalizes the second; which is, ",[55,90,91],{},"itself",", a demonstration of the second half.",[14,94,16,95,16,99],{},[18,96],{"src":97,"alt":98},"\u002Fwriting\u002F20260420.ai-is-a-platform-shift\u002Famara-law.webp","Chart illustrating Amara's Law.",[23,100,101],{},"Amara's Law. Perceived impact rises fast and plateaus; actual long-run impact lags, then surpasses.",[10,103,104],{},"The logic goes: I can see the hype. I can see what's weak. So I must still be early enough to wait. But spotting noise isn't evidence of good timing. The internet boom had years of obvious nonsense before the structural shift became undeniable. The people who cited \"too noisy\" as a reason to disengage mostly missed it.",[10,106,107],{},"People who work in or near this industry face a specific trap, and I've been inside it. When you see enough model releases, enough product launches, enough hot takes, the whole thing starts to feel routine. The strangeness wears off. What was remarkable six months ago is now just background noise. And without noticing it, familiarity starts to read as insignificance.",[14,109,16,110,16,114],{},[18,111],{"src":112,"alt":113},"\u002Fwriting\u002F20260420.ai-is-a-platform-shift\u002Fwatching-vs-participating.webp","A museum visitor studies a painting while someone outside is actually painting.",[23,115,116],{},"I could describe every brushstroke in detail. I hadn't picked up a brush.",[10,118,119,120,123,124,127],{},"Watching is not participating. The people accumulating real advantage right now aren't the ones with the sharpest takes. They're shipping things, learning from actual use, developing taste through exposure rather than consumption. Following the discourse closely ",[55,121,122],{},"feels"," like work. It mostly ",[55,125,126],{},"isn't",".",[36,129,131],{"id":130},"where-the-opportunity-actually-is","Where the opportunity actually is",[10,133,134],{},"Most people, when they hear \"AI opportunity\", imagine they need to build the next foundation model. That's almost never how these shifts pay out.",[10,136,137],{},"The internet created Amazon and Google, yes. But it also built an enormous surrounding industry: e-commerce operators, web agencies, SaaS companies, infrastructure providers. Shopify didn't invent the internet. It built around it, at the right time, in a vertical where the shift created a real opening. YouTube created a production economy beyond the celebrity creators: editors, thumbnail designers, channel managers, sponsorship businesses. People who became useful in ways that hadn't been possible before.",[10,139,140],{},"AI has more of this than any of those shifts. The opportunities worth betting on are in the surrounding layers: vertical applications in law, medicine, and engineering where AI gives a capability edge; becoming unusually good at deploying these systems where most organizations are still fumbling; building the trust and distribution that hardens before the window gets crowded.",[36,142,144],{"id":143},"counterarguments-i-take-seriously","Counterarguments I take seriously",[10,146,147],{},"The strongest version of the skeptical case isn't \"AI is overhyped.\" It's that the value commoditizes faster than you think. If the models become cheap utilities, building on top of them means building on top of a commodity. Application layers on commodity infrastructure tend to get squeezed. That's a real risk, particularly for businesses whose entire pitch is \"we wrapped a good model.\"",[10,149,150,151,154],{},"I held a version of this view for a while. It felt like the intellectually honest position. It's ",[55,152,153],{},"also",", in retrospect, a good way to stay comfortable without doing anything.",[10,156,157],{},"But that misreads where the actual advantages accumulate. The models themselves may commoditize. The organizational knowledge, the customer relationships, the earned trust: none of that runs on the same clock.",[10,159,160,161],{},"The risk of a wrong specific bet is much smaller than the risk of sitting out the whole shift. ",[55,162,163],{},"(Not financial advice 👀.)",[36,165,167],{"id":166},"what-moving-early-actually-looks-like","What \"moving early\" actually looks like",[10,169,170],{},"Moving early doesn't require quitting your job, raising a round, or making some loud public declaration about being an AI person.",[10,172,173],{},"The quieter version is more durable. Pick one workflow in your actual work and learn to do it better with AI tools until the improvement is obvious to everyone around you. Build something small and ship it. Write about what you're learning in a way that helps people in your field catch up, because that gap is still enormous in most industries.",[10,175,176],{},"The people I see in the strongest position right now didn't make one grand move. They made a series of small ones, each of which taught them something, and they've now developed a read on this space that most people don't have. Taste and judgment in a new domain accumulate through exposure. You can't read your way to them.",[10,178,179],{},"What matters is whether you're converting proximity into learning, and learning into things that compound.",[33,181],{},[10,183,184],{},"The version of this story that would bother me isn't that I missed the AI moment from far away.",[10,186,187],{},"It's that I was already close to it. Already inside the domain. Already watching it happen up close. And still stood still. Not because the window wasn't real, but because it never felt clear enough, clean enough, obvious enough.",[14,189,16,190,16,194],{},[18,191],{"src":192,"alt":193},"\u002Fwriting\u002F20260420.ai-is-a-platform-shift\u002Fday-one.webp","A notebook open to a page that reads Day 1, written and crossed out fourteen times.",[23,195,196],{},"Each of these felt like the real start. The most recent one still does.",[10,198,199],{},"That's the story I do not want.",[33,201],{},[36,203,205],{"id":204},"references","References",[207,208,209],"content-references",{},[210,211,212,229,236],"ol",{},[213,214,215,216,58,225,228],"li",{},"Timothy F. Bresnahan and Manuel Trajtenberg. ",[217,218,224],"a",{"href":219,"rel":220,"target":223},"https:\u002F\u002Fdoi.org\u002F10.1016\u002F0304-4076(94)01598-T",[221,222],"noopener","noreferrer","_blank","General purpose technologies 'engines of growth'?",[55,226,227],{},"Journal of Econometrics",", 65(1):83–108, 1995.",[213,230,231,232,235],{},"Carlota Perez. ",[55,233,234],{},"Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages",". Edward Elgar, 2002.",[213,237,238],{},"Roy Amara. Commonly attributed statement on technology forecasting. Institute for the Future, c. 1970s.",{"title":240,"searchDepth":241,"depth":241,"links":242},"",2,[243,244,245,246,247,248],{"id":38,"depth":241,"text":39},{"id":77,"depth":241,"text":78},{"id":130,"depth":241,"text":131},{"id":143,"depth":241,"text":144},{"id":166,"depth":241,"text":167},{"id":204,"depth":241,"text":205},"2026-04-20","On what the economics of general-purpose technologies tell us about where AI sits in history, and why passive proximity to the shift is not the same as acting on it.","md",{},true,"\u002Fwriting\u002Fai-is-a-platform-shift",{"title":5,"description":250},"writing\u002F20260420.ai-is-a-platform-shift","bZs392JZ29JkUJrH5TdjnfM3cEv1eLoiao6JJ5DEqSE",1780404016750]