Erik Brynjolfsson

Foreword

By Edo Segal

The number that should terrify you is not the one about AI. It's the one about electricity.

Thirty years. That's how long it took the electric motor to show up in the productivity statistics after factories started buying them. Thirty years of massive investment, visible machinery, and aggregate numbers that refused to move. The economists of that era had a phrase for it, though they wouldn't coin it until much later. They called it a paradox.

I didn't know this history when I stood in that room in Trivandrum watching twenty engineers each produce what twenty used to produce together. I knew what I was seeing — a twenty-fold multiplier, real and repeatable. I knew it in my body, the way you know something that changes the temperature in