Intuition Leads to Ubiquity

Nobody needed a manual

Every life-changing technology arrives with its use already attached. Nobody had to be taught what to do with a printing press: print the Bible. Nobody had to be told what to do with electricity: light up the factory, then the house. Nobody had to be persuaded what penicillin was for: the infection that was going to kill you. And nobody, on November 30, 2022, needed a tutorial for ChatGPT. The first thing a very large number of people typed into it was some version of four words: do my homework.

That is what I mean by intuition. Not a forecast, not a business plan. The immediate, almost bodily knowing of what a thing is for. And with it comes a second knowing, just as fast: this is not a fad. Nobody standing under the first electric lights in lower Manhattan in 1882 thought they were looking at a phase. Nobody who watched that white box write an essay in forty seconds thought it would go back in the bottle.

Here is the part that is easy to miss. The intuition was never really light. It was let the wire do the work. The light bulb was simply the most obvious place to aim it, at the oldest problem in the house, the dark. In the same way, the intuition was never really homework. It was let the machine do the work I do not want to do. Homework was simply the most obvious place to aim it, at the most universally unwanted work handed to the largest number of people.

The first use is the whole idea in its smallest form. Everything after is the same idea, pointed at one more object.

Watch what happened with electricity once the light was on. In 1882 a New Yorker named Henry Seely patented an electric flatiron. Around 1908 the Thor electric washer went on sale out of Chicago. In 1927 General Electric put a steel refrigerator in the kitchen. In 1971 the Crock-Pot. None of these was a new idea. Each was the same intuition, let the wire do the work, pointed at one more chore. The century of electrification was not a century of invention so much as a century of aiming.

It hurts, and it takes time

None of this happened overnight, and none of it happened without pain. By the late 1880s the sky over Manhattan was a black web of telegraph, telephone and electric-light wires. On October 11, 1889, a Western Union lineman named John Feeks climbed a pole at Chambers and Centre Streets to fix a line, touched a wire that a live power cable had crossed, and died in the tangle while a lunch-hour crowd watched from below. One reporter in the crowd blamed a monopoly. Edison’s camp had been electrocuting animals in public to scare people off his rival’s current. The city tore the poles down and buried the wires.

And people lost their livelihoods, as they always do. The lamplighter, the whaler, the iceman. Before them the scribe, after them the stable hand and the room full of human computers. The pain was real, and so was the fight.

But notice what the fight was about. Nobody in 1889 was arguing that the city should go back to gas. They argued about the wires: where they ran, who insulated them, who paid when someone died. The fight was never about the light. That is the signature of a real intuition. The argument is loud and bitter and long, and it is entirely about how, never about whether.

So why does it take so long, if the use is obvious on day one? Because the intuition is instant and the world is not. Every house had to be wired. Every chore needed its own machine. Every factory had to be torn down and rebuilt around the motor instead of bolting the motor onto the old line shaft. Time is not the gap between the idea and its acceptance. Time is the work of pointing the idea at everything.

The adjective moves

How do you know when it is done? Not by a chart. By a word.

When a technology arrives, it needs an adjective to tell it apart from the thing it replaces. The electric light. The horseless carriage. The cellular phone. Then, slowly, the adjective falls off. It is just the light, the car, the phone. And at the same moment something stranger happens: the old thing picks up an adjective it never needed. Phones become landlines. Mail becomes snail mail. Washing becomes washing by hand. In 1980 Frank Mankiewicz, then running National Public Radio, gave these words a name, retronyms, and William Safire made the name famous in his language column.

Put the two halves together and you have the cleanest test for ubiquity I know. Ubiquity is the moment the adjective changes sides. Mark Weiser, the Xerox PARC scientist who coined the phrase ubiquitous computing, said the same thing from the other direction in 1991: “The most profound technologies are those that disappear.” They do not disappear from the house. They disappear from the sentence.

The new thing, on arrival	The new thing, at ubiquity	The old thing, renamed
cellular phone	cellular phone	landline
digital camera	digital camera	film camera
electronic mail	email, then just mail	snail mail
electric washer	electric washer	washing by hand
AI-written	AI-written	unassisted

What is different this time

Electricity’s intuition, let the wire do the work, reached anything that needed heat, light or motion. That is a lot of objects, and it took a century to aim at them all.

AI’s intuition is wider. Do my work reaches anything that can be described in words. That is not a list of objects. It is nearly the whole of the to-do list: the form, the claim, the dispute, the permit, the schedule, the report, the reply. Homework was the light bulb. Everything you have ever put off is the iron, the washer and the refrigerator.

And the order will not be set by difficulty. It will be set by resentment. Laundry got its machine early because wash day was the worst day of the week. Homework went first in 2022 because it was the most hated work handed to the most people. The next objects will be whatever people hate doing most, whether or not it is hard.

The non-obvious consequence is that we will stop seeing it. The arguments we are having right now, is it cheating, is it slop, is it a bubble, are the arguments about the wires. They will not be settled by someone winning. They will be settled the way the wire panic was settled: by the thing becoming so ordinary that the argument has nothing left to point at. And the proof will not arrive on the new thing. It will arrive on the old one.

Five predictions

1. “AI” falls off the label.

   Within the next decade, putting AI on a product will read the way electric reads on a toaster: redundant and a little old-fashioned. The products that keep the word will be the ones that still have to explain themselves.

2. The old way gets the adjective, and the premium.

   Unassisted, handwritten and human-made will become ordinary labels on schoolwork, art and service, the way handmade and hand-washed are now. A label marks the exception, and exceptions cost more.

3. The spread follows the hate list.

   AI will reach chores in order of how much people resent them, not how hard they are. Paperwork, claims, disputes and scheduling go long before anything people enjoy, the way the washer came decades before anyone needed an electric carving knife.

4. AI gets its wire panic, and the answer is to bury the wires.

   There will be one vivid, public harm that everyone remembers by its picture. The response will be rules about the installation, who may connect what to what and with what insulation, not a retreat from the use. It is the same instinct behind regulating the door rather than the room.

5. Nobody will remember the year it arrived.

   Ask someone born after 2022 when AI came into their life and it will sound like asking when their house got electricity. They will not call it AI. They will call it asking, or getting it done.

Where I am living it

I am inside this one. When I opened our space in Charleston in January, I thought of it as a place to help people understand AI. What people actually want is what they wanted in 1908. Not a lesson in electricity. A washer. That is why Charleston AI delivers finished work rather than tools or training. Nobody took a course in alternating current. They plugged in the iron.

It is the same in my own day. My two favorite prompts are four words long, you do it, you decide, which is just do my homework grown up. I do not think of that as using AI any more than I think of the lamp on my desk as using electricity. That is the whole point.

The claim ledger

Back at the kitchen table

The fifteen-year-old who pasted that essay prompt in December 2022 will be twenty-seven in 2034. Somewhere in between, without any announcement, they will have stopped saying AI, the same way their great-grandparents stopped saying electric. Their own child will be the one at the table with the pencil.

That worksheet is the proof. Not an adoption curve, not a forecast. One word printed on the old way of doing things, because the new way no longer needs a name.

Intuition leads to ubiquity. It just takes time.