CONCEPT
Self-Augmenting Technique
Ellul's second structural claim: that technique produces the conditions for its own expansion, each technical achievement creating new problems that demand new technical solutions in a spiral that accelerates across time.
Self-augmentation is the mechanism by which technique grows without central direction. Each technical achievement extends the domain of the possible. The extended domain creates problems invisible from the previous vantage point — problems that exist only because the previous problems were solved. Those new problems demand new technical solutions. The new solutions extend the domain further. The further extension creates new problems. The spiral has been operating for five centuries. The AI moment represents something qualitatively new within it: the point at which the self-augmenting mechanism itself becomes automated, with AI improving AI at a speed governed by computation rather than by the slower pace of human cognitive labor that previously mediated every stage.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Gutenberg's press produced Bibles. It also produced, over three centuries, conditions for the scientific revolution, the Enlightenment, industrial manufacturing, and eventually the computer. At no point did anyone plan this sequence. Each stage followed from the previous one because the previous stage