The Five Stages of Technology Transition

In the AI Story

The first stage is threshold crossing — the moment at which a new technology crosses a capability boundary that makes the previous method categorically different rather than merely less efficient. The photograph did not make illustration slightly slower by comparison; it made the hand-drawn scientific image appear subjective in ways that had not been visible before. The threshold is a qualitative rupture, not a quantitative improvement.

The second stage is exhilaration — a period during which the technology's early users experience the genuine expansion of capability the threshold represents. The exhilaration is not false. It reflects a real increase in what can be accomplished, a real democratization of capacities previously confined to specialists. The exhilaration is always warranted; it is also always partial, because the technology's characteristic limitations have not yet become visible.

The third stage is resistance — the protest of practitioners whose expertise the new technology has devalued. Daston's work consistently emphasizes that resistance is grounded in real loss, not in irrational technophobia. The bards who memorized epic verse lost their livelihood when writing made memory dispensable. The scientific illustrators lost their authority when photography made manual rendering appear subjective. The resistance is the sound of genuine expertise being reorganized by a force that does not respect the categories in which the expertise was developed.

The fourth stage is adaptation — the period during which institutional infrastructure for the technology's reliable use is constructed. This stage is the subject of most of Daston's historical research. It is slow, contested, and incomplete. It involves standards, practices, training programs, evaluative conventions, and moral economies of trust that together constitute the epistemological architecture the community develops around the technology. Adaptation is always late relative to deployment, and the gap between the two is where the period of costly errors occurs.

The fifth stage is settled use — the long period during which the technology is deployed within the institutional framework the adaptation phase produced. Settled use is never perfectly calibrated; the institutions are never fully adequate; new failure modes emerge. But settled use differs qualitatively from the uncalibrated use of the exhilaration phase, because the community has developed the collective knowledge and shared standards that enable trust to be extended in proportion to evidence rather than in proportion to the technology's confidence artifacts. The current AI moment sits at the late edge of exhilaration and the early edge of adaptation, with resistance visible and settled use not yet imaginable.

Origin

The five-stage framework is articulated most fully in Segal's The Orange Pill (2026) and elaborated in Daston's volume as a synthesis of her historical research across multiple technology transitions. The underlying pattern has been observed by many historians of science, but its articulation as a specific sequence of five stages, with attention to the gap between deployment and institutional response, is characteristic of the Daston-Galison approach to the history of objectivity.

The framework draws on and extends Thomas Kuhn's analysis of scientific revolutions, Daston and Galison's three-regime periodization of objectivity, and the sociological literature on technology adoption. What distinguishes it is the explicit focus on the gap between deployment and institutional response as the period during which costly errors accumulate and the institutional response is motivated.

Key Ideas

Threshold crossing is qualitative. New technologies do not make existing methods slower; they make them appear categorically different, reorganizing the epistemological stakes.

Exhilaration is genuine but partial. Early enthusiasm reflects real expansion of capability; it does not reflect the technology's characteristic limitations, which remain invisible.

Resistance is grounded in real loss. Practitioners whose expertise is devalued are not primitive technophobes but expert observers whose specific skills have been reorganized.

Adaptation is always late. Institutional infrastructure is constructed after the period in which it would have prevented the most significant damage — motivated by the damage itself.

Settled use differs from initial use. The gap between the technology's implicit claims and its actual reliability narrows through institutional achievement, not through individual discipline alone.

Debates & Critiques

A debate concerns whether the five-stage framework oversimplifies transitions that were in practice more heterogeneous, with different disciplines moving at different speeds and sometimes reversing course. Daston's position is that the framework identifies a consistent structural pattern at a level of abstraction where the heterogeneity is the variation on a theme, not a refutation of it. A more consequential debate concerns the AI transition specifically: whether its pace and scale mean the framework still applies or whether the compression of transitions into months rather than decades represents a qualitatively new situation that historical patterns cannot predict. The volume's position is that the structural pattern applies with adjustment for tempo, but the adjustment requires institutional responses of unprecedented scale.