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This thought hit me while reading James Governor’s riff on something Ben Griffiths wrote about our industry’s habit of confusing age with authority. Griffiths remembered sitting through a conference talk in which a speaker tried to shame a young audience for not recognizing some of the older men who had shaped computing. The irony, Ben noted, was that many of those “old men” had done their world-changing work when they were younger than the people being lectured. Bill Joy wrote vi when he was 22, John Carmack created Doom at 23, Linus Torvalds launched Linux at 22, etc. Many of our industry’s titans made their biggest contributions before they had decades of experience.
The point isn’t that young people are smarter. They’re not. The point isn’t that the key to AI success is to ignore more experienced developers. That’s dumb. Rather, it’s a suggestion that Griffiths’ larger point is right: At the beginning of big shifts, experience can be a mixed blessing. It can help you see risk, but it can also make you overconfident in old ways. The most successful enterprises will find ways to balance youthful innovation with experienced guardrails.
The factory doesn’t redesign itself
Zara Zhang recently pointed to Paul David’s classic 1990 paper, “The Dynamo and the Computer,” as a way to understand why so many companies have “adopted” AI without much to show for it. David’s argument, simplified, is that electricity didn’t immediately transform factories. For a long time, factories simply swapped out the central steam engine for an electric motor while keeping the same layout, the same workflows, and the same assumptions.
Electricity was new, but we largely stifled its potential by force-fitting it into old factory systems.
