If you drive past a new data-center build in Texas or Virginia today, you might catch a strange sight: a row of trailer-mounted jet engines idling beside concrete shells and cooling towers. They’re not there to fly—they’re there to think.

Yesterday, I spent the afternoon at NVIDIA’s headquarters in Santa Clara. It’s hard not to walk through those glass corridors without feeling that you’ve stepped inside the engine room of a new industrial age. Banks of machines hum like power plants. Engineers move with quiet precision, orchestrating what feels less like software development and more like manufacturing reality itself.

In the summer of 1956, a group of scientists gathered at Dartmouth College to do something extraordinary: decode the nature of human intelligence and recreate it inside a machine. It seems strangely naive now that a handful of white-shirted men, smoking pipes in the New Hampshire heat, believed they could solve consciousness in a few months, the way you might solve a crossword puzzle. Yet the impulse behind that meeting—the conviction that intelligence could be bottled, controlled, and productized—has never really gone away.

Hollywood is in uproar over Tilly Norwood, an AI-generated “actress” that talent agents are reportedly lining up to sign. SAG-AFTRA, the actors’ union, quickly condemned the move, declaring that creativity “must remain human-centered.” But the real significance of Tilly isn’t about movies at all. She is a glimpse into the next great disruption of work: when synthetic talent—actors, consultants, analysts, even leaders—compete alongside human professionals. What’s playing out in Hollywood today is simply the first act of a drama that will transform every industry built on knowledge and creativity.

When we think about industrial revolutions, we usually focus on the technology — the steam engine, the light bulb, the transistor, the internet. But the true power of an industrial revolution is not the technical invention itself. It is the way that invention permanently alters the unit cost economics of doing valuable work.