CONCEPT
Rate of Change
Polanyi's underappreciated concern with the speed at which economic transformation unfolds relative to society's capacity to absorb it — now the most dangerous variable in the AI equation, compressing timelines the original great transformation stretched across a century.
Polanyi insisted that the pace of market-driven change was itself a factor in its destructiveness. A transformation that unfolds slowly enough for social institutions to adapt produces manageable dislocation; the same transformation accelerated overwhelms adaptive capacity and produces the kind of dislocation that destroys communities and triggers destructive counter-movements. The speed variable was largely ignored by subsequent economists who focused on distribution and aggregate outcomes, but it has reemerged as central in analyses of the AI transformation. AI compresses into years transformations the original great transformation took a century to produce, creating a structural gap between market expansion (operating at computational speed) and institutional adaptation (operating at human social speed) that is itself the primary source of risk.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The original great transformation unfolded over approximately a century, from the first enclosures of the late eighteenth century to the fully constructed welfare state of the mid-twentieth. The duration