CONCEPT
The Stored Pressure Model
The economic analog of potential energy: productive capacity held in latent form by a constraint, invisible to measurement, releasing instantaneously when the constraint is removed.
The stored pressure model treats latent demand as potential energy in the rigorous physical sense — real productive capacity held in latent form by a constraint, generating no observable economic activity while the constraint persists, and releasing instantaneously when the constraint is removed. The parallel to potential energy in physics is not metaphorical but structural: a boulder at the top of a hill, a compressed spring, water held behind a dam. The energy is real but unexpressed. It does no work, produces no visible effect, appears in no measurement of current activity. And it releases, when the constraint is lifted, with a force proportional not to the characteristics of the release channel but to the depth and duration of the accumulation.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The constraint that held the AI-era creative pressure in place was the translation cost — the cognitive tax levied on every person who wanted to make a machine do something and had to learn the machine's language to