CONCEPT
Production Over Innovation
Edgerton's empirical demonstration that production has contributed more to economic output than innovation across every major technological era of the past century — and the prediction that AI's significance will be measured in mundane production gains, not frontier demonstrations.
The distinction between innovation and production is one of the foundational analytical moves in Edgerton's use-centered history. Innovation is the creation of new things. Production is the ongoing manufacture and use of existing things. Across every major technological era of the past century, production has contributed more to economic output than innovation — by orders of magnitude. The vast majority of economic activity in any given year consists not of creating new products and services but of producing existing ones: manufacturing the same cars, processing the same payroll, shipping the same goods, providing the same medical care, teaching the same curricula, running the same systems that ran last year and the year before that. Innovation changes what is produced. Production determines how much of it reaches people.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The historical illustration Edgerton returns to most often is the electrification of American factories. The innovation narrative focuses on