The Next Rung

Everyone’s fighting about AI right now. Good or bad. Savior or threat. Pick a side.

When I look at this, I don’t see a new story. I see the same story humans have been telling for 150 years.

The War of Currents. 1888. Edison electrocuted dogs, cats, and a circus elephant named Topsy in public — all with AC — to prove it was deadly. He lobbied for AC to power the first electric chair. People genuinely believed alternating current would kill their children in their sleep.

Today you flick a switch and don’t think twice.

The automobile. 1903. People called cars devil wagons. Laws required a man with a red flag to walk 60 yards ahead of every car on the road.

Before cars, there was the hatti gadi. The horse cart. People walked everywhere. Cycled. Carried things on their own backs. They were strong. Real physical strength built into daily life. That strength was not abstract. It was real.

Then cars won.

And here’s what actually happened. People lost that muscle. They stopped walking. Stopped cycling. Their bodies changed. That was a genuine loss. You can’t pretend it wasn’t.

But they gained something else. Speed. Distance. Entire cities rebuilt around roads. New industries exploded into existence. Mechanics. Fuel stations. Assembly lines. Road construction. Logistics networks. Global supply chains.

Now here’s the detail that stays with me. Nobody today repairs their own car. You buy it. You drive it. You keep a spare tyre in the back. When something breaks, you call a mechanic. That’s the entire relationship.

The muscle you lost? You don’t miss it. You evolved past needing it. The new world made it optional.

AI feels exactly the same to me.

The scope is bigger this time. Developers are in the crosshairs. Knowledge workers. People whose entire identity is tied to their craft. The panic is louder because the impacted group has a microphone.

But here’s the thing. We’ve already been climbing this ladder for 70 years. We just didn’t call it AI.

1950s. You programmed with punched cards. Literal holes in paper. 1960s. Assembly language. You told the machine where to move every byte. 1970s. C. Still close to the metal. But now a human could read it. 1990s. Python. Java. You wrote intent. The compiler figured out the rest. 2010s. Frameworks. Fifty lines of code became one import statement. 2025. Natural language. You describe what you want. The machine writes the code.

Tell me that’s not the same curve.

Each rung made the previous one optional. Nobody mourns punched cards. Nobody romanticizes manual memory allocation. Nobody wants to go back to MOV AX, BX. People just climbed to the next rung and built bigger things than they could before.

AI is the next rung. Not the last one.

This is just a first take. I’m still thinking through it. Would genuinely like to know how you see this. Are we overreacting? Under-reacting? Is this time actually different?

Thought??