CONCEPT

Ephemeralization

Fuller's 1938 term for technology's progressive capacity to do more with less — until, eventually, you do everything with nothing. The river finally reaching cognition itself.

Ephemeralization is Buckminster Fuller's name for the most consequential empirical trend in technological civilization: the progressive substitution of organized information for brute material force. A transatlantic message in 1866 weighed hundreds of tons of copper cable; by the 1960s, a few hundred pounds of satellite; by the 1990s, ounces of fiber-optic glass. Same function, vanishing material. Fuller tracked this curve across industrial alloys, vacuum tubes, transistors, and integrated circuits, treating it not as forecast but as law — as fundamental as thermodynamics. In the winter of 2025, the function reached the cognitive substrate itself: AI began doing more thinking with less human instruction, dissolving not a material barrier but the barrier of technical specialization. The imagination-to-artifact ratio is ephemeralization measured in hours per unit of creative output rather than tons per unit of performance.

In The You On AI Field Guide

The trajectory is empirical rather than speculative. Fuller derived it from weight-to-performance ratios across decades of industrial materials, demonstrating that each generation accomplished the same function with a

In The You On AI Field Guide

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