I’ve been thinking about this idea and never really took the time to flesh through the comparisons and the streams that carry along both of these forces. This post is mostly a blip on ‘what’ not ‘why’.
A short summary on the ‘why’ before starting. What created this fragmentary force that I bring up in the blog in the first place can partly be attributed to the cartesian split that made the world out to be subject and observer, and to be mind and body. The world stopped being seen and felt as a united realm of corporeality and psyche and instead a world composed of parts. We started creating instruments to neatly measure everything and theorems to start categorizing the world. The new framing that this subject/observer world operates in is one of ‘dissection’ and ‘fragmentation’ and one that has ties with Jean Gebser’s Perspectival consciousness structure.
The first frontier that this new perspectival consciousness got to work in was the physical since it was the most apparent and easily accessed. The ventures of perspectival consciousness into the physical was the Industrial Revolution.
Once people were fully immersed in the Industrial Revolution I believe that there was real conflict with the world at large. There was contradiction in how people lived outwardly and what they felt to be true. The external corporeal world that people once lived in was completely collapsing, and so to escape this outer uncontrollable world people turned to the only other safe haven they had – the internal world. It is PRECISELY during this time in the industrial revolution that we see sharp rises in hysteria, mental sickness, and suicide. This is extremely well documented all throughout the 19th century. This new internality and frontier would bring into the world its new adventurers and explorers with figures such as Nietzsche, Freud, and Jung; all whom made it their life’s goals to map out the new internal frontier and ways in which we could live and flourish within this new land.
But the Perspectival consciousness was right on the heels of this new frontier and it has since started to work its way into our inner worlds. This venturing of the perspectival consciousness into our internal worlds then is the Intelligence revolution. Also, as the outer corporeal world collapsed for the people during the Industrial age we also see our inner worlds start to collapse as we dive deeper into the intelligence age. Our traditions, history, ideas, and ideals have started to deteriorate as the mass of information and media has started to barge into our inner worlds. There are no more firm ideals that we can call home anymore between all ourselves. The information age has ravaged it. Everyone is torn and split, even those amongst the same exact groups, and even amongst the same person. The intelligence revolution has started to ‘dissect’ and ‘fragment’ the inner world of man and we see inner cohesion has started to deteriorate. We are starting to see a new rise in mental sickness as we approach this new intelligence age ai peak.
I’d like to say that these are not mental illnesses. We only categorize them as such with our neat little rules and standards that is so prevalent with perspectival consciousness. These are not chemical imbalances in the brain but rather a reflection and a reaction to the world that one lives in. It is your body letting you know that there is something very real in the environment that needs your attention, but this perspective is lost on many people if the mind/body split narrative is seen to be true which is again a perspectival structure idea. There is no split between the mind and body.
But this consciousness structure has its limits and we are starting to see cracks in the seams. We’ve already started the shift from a Perspectival consciousness structure to the Integral/Envisionary consciousness structures and the ruptures in the world will only increase the speed that we chug along at – hopefully.
Intro
The Intelligence Revolution paradigm shift is eerily similar to the Industrial Revolution. One always hears the comparison being made and there seems to be a basis for it. But are they different or are they offshoots of the same underlying forces? I think the latter. Both of these paradigm shifts stem from the same underlying forces but work on different parts of man. To start, we had the Industrial Revolution which affected man’s physical and dexterous capacities through the facilitation of manufacturing processes, standardized tooling, specialized equipment, mechanical power, and in general the material processes. The ‘Intelligence revolution’ on the other hand is a layer deeper; it’s a derivate of the industrial and the material, and it motions towards the automation of cognition, discrete logic, and more recently with ai, faculties like analytical thinking, design, and judgement. With these observations in mind we can make a correspondence between the Industrial Revolution to man’s body, and from the Intelligence Revolution to man’s cognitive faculties.
There’s 3 comparisons I’d like to make between the Industrial Revolution and the Intelligence Revolution. These are.
Time
Nature
Work
And the lens I’d like to make these comparisons through is through the lens of ‘dissection’ and ‘fragmentation’. Even before the Industrial Revolution, man had started to dissect nature and physical reality into discrete fragmented pieces. The Intelligence Revolution seems to be doing a similar thing on a cognitive level. At the dawn of the industrial age and with the power of this new fragmentary frame of mind man looked out to the most intricate puzzle pieces of nature and was able to dissect them into their most basic components; this allowed him to mix and match the pieces into creations all his own and look at the world of phenomena as one would a game of Tetris. With these pieces a new clockwork mechanical world was built.
Time
Agrarian time was different. It was built on a grounded relationship with nature. The Sun, seasons, and plants let you know when its time to reap and sow your crops. When its time to wake up the roosters crow at the break of first light, and when its nighttime the owls will hoot and the frogs will croak as you doze off for bed. The Sun, Moon, seasons, celestial bodies, animals, plants, and people all lived (and still do) in an interconnected world whose time and rhythm they shared in and which they helped inform each other of. They all share time and have an interrelated organic relationship with each other – this is grounded time. There’s no need for a watch in this world since the path of the Sun and Moon tells you all you need, and there’s no need for a calendar either since the seasons, stars, animals, and plants direct your time and rhythms of life.
Then came about the Industrial Revolution which brought massive change to the old time. No longer was time felt to be organic. It became dissected and fragmented away from nature, and man made it linear and continuous. A proxy and veil between man and nature was developed. Man no longer dictated his life on the natural rhythm of nature but on the bells of the city clocktower, the punching in of the work clock, and the shrieking whistle of the factory – punctuality became enforced and the clock became the symbol for the new perception of time. These perceptual changes were externalized with new social norms and tastes during the industrial era; the idea of a clockwork society gained acceptance by the general public during this period and there was an accompanying surge of wristwatch popularity in the 19th century that marked the transition (interesting side note, it was during WWI that watches became mandatory and standard issue for infantry). One of the greatest testaments to the changing times was the construction of Big Ben which was completed in 1859, and still stands tall in Great Britains Palace of Westminster to this day. What better way to symbolize the new mechanical overseer of pace, rhythm, work, wealth, and life of the city below then through the new proprietor of time – the ubiquitous clock.
Even work pace was affected. Before the Industrial Revolution, the worker’s pace was a natural one based on skill and the work needed to be done for the townsfolk and export – this idea was turned on its head during the Industrial Revolution. Steam engines were introduced and quickly used to power tens or hundreds of power looms in a factory. The pace of the textile worker was no longer grounded but based on how fast the steam engine went; the worker’s loom was connected to the sole pace keeper of the factory which was a mechanical machine disconnected from the natural rhythms of the world. This is mechanical time. This new time reigned supreme in every single factory across England and the US and almost no sector was untouched. Textiles, iron and steel factories, food canning and processing, railways and steam engines, arms manufacturing, mining, and chemical factory work were all transformed to run on machine and whistle time – mechanical clock synchronization took over.
Now we have the Intelligence Revolution that has fundamentally changed the way that we interact with time but in the cognitive sense. In this new revolution it is the mind and attention that is being affected; this means that time as it relates to the mind will be the thing to change, and if we take a look around this is what we see. We have new age ideas popping up that large corporations operate under like attention economy, and attention retention. Attentional time is the new paradigm that replaces mechanical clock time. Instead of the steam whistle we have the notification ping, and instead of labor clock time we have cognitive attentional time as the frame under which to complete our work. Our time is now dominated by notifications, attention, and cognitive processing and not so much the clock.
We also see that the work pace and timing has changed just like in the industrial age. Work now extends past the regular 9-5. You can get calls or notifications extending out of this work window and even into the weekends. Mechanical clock time doesn’t matter as much anymore. The new paradigm does – attentional time.
Another comparison to be made is the introduction of ais into tech companies (of which every company now is). An ai that centralizes cognitive load corresponds to the steam engine which centralized power production in the industrial age; ai powers each worker’s device just like the steam engine powered each worker’s power loom, and the information age worker no longer works at a grounded cognitive capacity but at the capacity and expanded scope of the computational power of ai.
This means that the new pace is the ai pace. When the agentic ai workloads are producing output you accelerate, and when it breaks you slow down. When you become the bottleneck it leaves you behind just like the steam engine would the loom worker. This relationship between man and ai pacing is ai attentional synchronization. Unlike the industrial eras mechanical clock synchronization, ai attentional synchronization more nefariously dictates action from within; cognition and attention become self optimized to function seamlessly with ai workflows and pacing, and unbeknownst to the worker they’ll soon be dancing to the tune of ai and not of themselves.
Nature
Material resources were ripped apart from the world during the Industrial Revolution. Minerals, air, water, chemicals, plants, processes and animals were fragmented off from the environment. These were quickly dissected, catalogued, and formalized; this allowed man to view these fragmented parts as resources, components, and parts in his mechanical constructs. The natural world became natural resources. These resources then became the underlying infrastructure on which the industrial world rested on. Essentially a new derivative man made order was created from the underlying natural order. Instead of hills, rivers, and fertile land being the markers for human settlements it became areas that could house factories, and act as centralized logistical centers where natural resources could be fed in. People started flocking to the industrial cities that were being constructed and becoming the new centers of production and society. These cities became societies new hubs and the places where people worked, where people met, and where people lived. You can think of the industrial cities of Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburg, Cleveland, and New York.
This maps with the new intelligence age. Industrial infrastructure is the new Intelligence Revolutions ‘natural resource’. We see that industrial infrastructure is being depleted for building the intelligence web that sprawls out across the whole world. This new intelligent buildout is Amazon Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and Alibaba Cloud. It’s literally in the name – IAAS infrastructure as a service. From these we get everything else like youtube, tiktok, instagram, x, banking apps, job apps, discord, slack, facebook, gmail, amazon, and temu. We even pay our natural resource bills through this new foundational stratum.
The difference between industrial infrastructure and intelligence buildout is that the latter is distributed; you don’t need to be in its vicinity to access it. You only need a phone. And mirroring the distributed intelligence infrastructure of today, life is becoming more distributed. We work online, meet people online, get ideas online, organize ourselves online, entertain ourselves online, and as the past decade has shown us more of our life seems to be tethered to the sticky web of the internet. There is one similarity to the industrial era worth noting, people still flock to the centers of the intelligence buildout. People still need to physically live somewhere. Think of places like Silicon Valley, Seattle, New York, and Austin.
This is nothing to say about the new ai buildout. Massive data centers are being built across the globe to support the new intelligence buildout which is devouring the underlying industrial infrastructure. There’s not enough power or computation in the current infrastructure to support this enormous expansion. The Intelligence Revolution is shaking up the underlying industrial infrastructure like how the Industrial Revolution did with natural resources. We had forests being swept clean, minerals being extracted, and dams being built to power the old era. Now we have the current buildout wiping out the electrical grid, taking over general computation, and guzzling down water infrastructure for cooling down. So powerful are these forces that the taboos of nuclear power have been cast aside and new far flung ideas like data centers in space have been suggested as ways to supply the necessary infrastructure to the intelligence buildout.
Work
Work just like time and natural resources has been picked apart and dissected. The worker’s job from start to finish had been fragmented into simple parts and processes with many no longer having a deep living knowledge of their craft. Work during the Industrial Revolution started to mirror the clockwork mentality of the day; a job was something that could be built up of easily reproducible and interchangeable pieces and processes.
Power became an interchangeable component during the industrial era. Power from man and beast was substituted for mechanical machines; out went the horse and in went the steam engine, combustion engine and conversely the power loom, car, tractor, and railway.
This law of reducibility and interchangeability continued into manufacturing processes: we see during the end of the 18th century the idea of standardization in tooling, product components, and processes start to appear in weapons manufacturing. Eli Whitney would be an early advocate for interchangeable musket parts and it was his promotion of the idea that would later bear fruit at Springfield Armories. By 1850 there were about 50 tolerance gauges for the Model 1842 musket, and it was shown that if the tight tolerance standards could be met that parts made in different armories could be used to successfully construct a musket. It was this early work done by the armories and the weapons industry that would become the forerunner and blueprint to the famous Ford Assembly Line.
Standardized work procedures would also come into play during this time. Large jobs would be broken down into smaller easily reproducible actions during this time. This ideology is perfectly described by Adam Smiths famous pin factory illustration from 1776.
One man draws out the wire; another straights it; a third cuts it; a fourth points it; a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head; to make the head requires two or three distinct operations; to put it on is a peculiar business; to whiten the pins is another … and the important business of making a pin is, in this manner, divided into about eighteen distinct operations, which, in some manufactories, are all performed by distinct hands, though in others the same man will sometimes perform two or three of them.
Slowly but surely work started to become automated by engines, machines, and standardizations. There were people that were affected by this mechanical threat, and there were many uprisings as a result to changes in quality, pacing, output, and wages for work. The famous Luddite uprising of the early 19th century was one such case. Their main reasons for destroying power looms were that they had destroyed wages, livelihoods, had deteriorated the workmanship of products, and secondarily that the power looms had forced unsustainable work paces for the loom worker’s of the day.
How do these changes correspond to the ongoing cognitive revolution? What once affected the bodily capacity of man is now affecting the cognitive capacities of man, so this is where we have to look to find our answer. Logical cognitive work denotes ideas like planning, organizing, compartmentalizing, assessing, and comparing, and the rise of general computing marked a distinct change with the way we interact with these. General computing introduced revolutionary ways for the layman to interface with ideas and information. A number of technologies facilitated this like GUIs, mice, and computer keyboards. These would then lay the foundational framework in which deterministic logic could be programmed into a machine using software languages.
These technologies enabled people to offload cognitive processes onto a machine, and which would eventually culminate into the personal computer- a device that personally did computation and logic on behalf of a person. After this introduction oceans of software and devices would be created that revolutionized the world and made possible some of the daily trivialities that we now take completely for granted. Examples are spreadsheet software which completely revolutionized the business sector, electronic cash registers and inventory systems which revolutionized retail and the way we get goods, databases revolutionized record keeping all across the globe and in every single sector, early word processors revolutionized the way we write, read, and publish information in every avenue of life, and CAD software turned architecture, engineering, and blueprint work on its head.
It’s when everyone gained access to general computation that the cognitive revolution really gained traction, and this genesis is most beautifully symbolized by the first successful personal computer device – the Apple Macintosh. The Apple logo shows a bite taken out of an apple, the same image depicted in Genesis when Eden takes a bite from the fruit of ‘KNOWLEDGE’. You can’t get more on the nose than this! It’s with the introduction of the Macintosh that the apple of knowledge became available to anyone through the tip of their fingertips, and its this personal computer platform that would make possible the rest of the intelligence buildout. Soon, the world wide web became commonplace and all the worlds knowledge and ideas could be spread and shared instantly in something the size of a box.
We’re now arriving to a new peak of this intelligence buildout. Not only has a large amount of deterministic cognitive work been offloaded to the personal computing device, but we also see deeper forms of intellectual faculties being untethered from man through the use of ai. Some of these faculties being replaced are analytical thinking, design, decision and judgement. We now have ais that build, plan, design, assess, choose and judge building architectures, software, financial strategies, administration work, business and legal document creation, art, writing, mechanical engineering designs, and factory layouts and oversights. Moreover, there are agentic workflows and improvements being made that will enable automation of whole production pipelines, and in some industries we’re already approaching full automation loops with only minimal human oversight. But even human direction might someday be replaced, and it’s then that the process becomes self perpetuating and one that consumes and regurgitates itself to survive, it becomes an ouroboros snake. In software engineering we already have agentic loops where ai develops code, ai tests code, ai automates deployments, ai suggests improvements and updates, and the loop starts over.
As a side note there’s lots of new talks on ai poisoning itself since much of its new training data now contains artificial, proxy, and ai generated content, this is called model collapse; the ai is in a very literal sense becoming ungrounded from reality much like the human has through the industrial and intelligence revolution. It’s poisoning itself by the consumption of its own regurgitated artificial output – the same stuff we’re mentally eating mind you.
This now takes us full circle to the Industrial Revolution and comparisons can now be made. Our cognitive tools have standardized just like tooling in the Industrial Revolution, we all use many of the same applications, and software to get things done. Think of industry wide standard tools like AutoCAD for CAD design, IntelliJ for software development, Bloomberg terminals for financial tooling centralization, and Google suite tools for information creation and sharing. We even see that cognitive jobs are now being broken down into discrete steps much like Adam Smith’s pin factory illustration above, and like a modern factory you can plop different agentic ai’s on top of these steps to automate them away.
What we’re seeing is that these mental faculties that people use on a day to day basis are starting to be replaced by software and ai much like power and dexterous work was replaced by the engine and machine in the industrial age. Now with minimal training in prompting and language a Joe can start to replace another Joe in a modern information age job. And so, we have the following.
Artisan -> Machine Operator
Knowledge Craftsman is approaching -> Prompt Engineer
I don’t think we should lament the fact that machines have taken over some of the most monotonous and repetitive work. But I do think we should lament the fact that the modern job has taken away the opportunity to have an embodied relationship with the whole of a work. There’s a joy in creating something carefully and purposefully made for somebody else and whose process you’re an integral and important part of from beginning to end. Many modern jobs commoditize products to where there is no semblance of any human touch in them. Products are standardized, sanitized, and mass produced, and the worker would be amiss to think that any of themselves is reflected in the final product, and so there is a disassociation between people and their work nowadays. I think this partly culminates into the modern belief of keeping work and the home completely separated.
Closing Ideas
The Industrial Revolution and the intelligence buildout are offshoots of the same frame of mind. One that perceives the world as mechanistic and attempts to dissect the world into its composite parts. These pieces are reproducible, interchangeable, and standardized and can be interlocked and combined to create bigger mechanical constructs. This is the world that we see today; it is a manmade construct which is now the foundation of our civilization. Its one that has created amazing and marvelous things, but also one where we’ve lost the plot to, and one that has started to go past its limitations.
We’d be making a big mistake if we continued looking at the world in this machine way. The world in its interwovenness, connectedness, and meaning is too vast to know in such a mundane and static way. We can no sooner say that we understand the world in a deep intuitive sense then we can the human being by dissecting his body and cataloguing the parts that he’s composed of; this completely misses the point of knowing something in a living, and contiguous sense.
The ideas and technologies that have been developed in the last 2-300 years shouldn’t be shunned, but we’ve stumbled a little and our relationship with them has become inverted. Instead of us directing them for living creative purposes it seems that they now control us as tools and resources for its own perpetuation. It seems to me that during this period we’ve lost a little heart and soul and taken in a little of the machine within ourselves. In the future, when we look upon each other, one can only hope that we see another living being and not a machine or resource of the great artifice that’s being constructed.
What can be said is that all the conflicts, contradictions, and crises right now are the birthing pains of a new way of envisioning the world, of living in it, and reframing our relationship with it.