Adam Smith

Foreword

By Edo Segal ^ Opus

I have been building at the frontier of technology for thirty years. I have watched tools evolve from command lines to touchscreens, from dial-up to streaming, from local software to cloud platforms. Each transition felt enormous at the time. Each one collapsed a barrier between human intention and machine capability.

And each one, I now realize, was a rehearsal.

The framework that Adam Smith laid out in The Wealth of Nations—the division of labor as the engine of productivity—has governed how we organize creative work for two and a half centuries. The programmer performed the programmer's tasks. The designer, the designer's. Each specialized operation was performed by a workman trained for that operation alone, and the efficiency of the whole was the product of this division.

AI has