PERSON
Everett Rogers
The sociologist who proved that innovations spread through social networks according to a predictable S-shaped pattern, that adoption is always a social act rather than a rational calculation, and whose five decades of empirical work on diffusion provide the most comprehensive analytical framework for understanding the human encounter with the AI transition.
Everett Rogers (1931–2004) is the cartographer of the adoption curve. His 1962 book
Diffusion of Innovations—revised through five editions over four decades and among the most-cited works in the social sciences—synthesized hundreds of studies into a framework of extraordinary generality: innovations spread through social systems according to an S-shaped curve, driven by interpersonal communication through networks of trust, and the rate and pattern of adoption can be predicted from five attributes of the innovation as
perceived by potential adopters. Rogers grew up on an Iowa farm and his earliest research was motivated not by abstract interest in adoption curves but by a concrete concern: why did farmers whose livelihoods depended on innovation fail to adopt it? The answer—that adoption is a social act, mediated by trust, shaped by structural position, and governed by the dynamics of interpersonal communication rather than the logic of rational