There’s a witch hunt underway for anyone who uses AI to make things, which is overshadowing the more important question of whether the generated content is any good. My unpopular opinion is that using technology to unlock creativity is not the real issue. We’ve always done it. The printing press, the synthesizer, the camera, and Photoshop were each accused of killing craft in their day. The real problem is that everything generated by AI is becoming too similar. The content isn’t bad. It is just too predictable.

For most of the modern age, companies have been designed around business processes. Managers mapped how work moved from one team to another, from request to approval, from customer problem to service resolution, from opportunity to invoice. The process was the operating logic of the firm: a way of coordinating people, systems, controls and time. But the arrival of AI agents is beginning to change that picture. Jensen Huang recently put the shift starkly, arguing that companies now built around business processes may, in the future, be built on “frameworks” — proprietary systems that represent a company’s workflows and make their components more autonomous, proactive and efficient.

There is, perhaps, a small silver lining in the current wave of AI anxiety. Not long ago, the dominant fears revolved around killer robots, runaway superintelligence, and apocalyptic scenarios that ended with data centers being nuked from space. Today the panic is more grounded, and in many ways more sophisticated. We are no longer imagining machines conquering humanity; we are worrying about white-collar unemployment ticking above 10%, mortgage books wobbling in San Francisco, and private credit portfolios unraveling because software agents can write code faster than junior analysts. The monsters have moved from science fiction to the balance sheet.

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.

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.