We did the maths: map 2.6 million years of tool-making (from the first Oldowan stone tools to today) onto a 24-hour clock.
- Agriculture (~12,000 years ago) shows up at 23:53.
- The printing press (~1450) and the first commercial steam engine (1712) land in the last few seconds.
- Light bulb, car, radio, TV, ENIAC, ARPANET and the web all crowd into the final fraction of a second.
- ChatGPT (November 2022) arrives at 23:59:59.87.
Each jump comes sooner than the last: millions of years from stone to farming, two and a half centuries from press to steam, one generation from the web to the phone in your pocket.
What makes generative AI different is that it works with language, the raw material of intellectual work. It doesn't think like us and can be confidently wrong, but it automates cognitive tasks, not just physical ones.
Sources for the numbers: GSMA State of Mobile Internet Connectivity 2024, Reuters (2 Feb 2023, UBS estimate), Vaswani et al. 2017, IMF SDN/2024/001, IEA "Energy and AI" (2025).
Curious what others think: is the acceleration real, or just a trick of where we put the "now"?