Aneesh Raman

So then as I looked at steam engine electricity internet, one thing popped out.

If you think about steam engine to electricity, that was a big shift.

And we write about in the book how the companies that saw the gains of electricity understood that and rebuilt the entire workplace around the electric motor in a different way than they had from the steam engine.

But if you think about humans at work, it didn't change a lot.

Like you were still at a factory as a human at work.

You were doing different factory work, but you were still doing largely physical labor on an assembly line building things.

Then the internet comes along and that kind of does change work in a big way, right?

We get the knowledge economy.

Suddenly college becomes a bigger deal.

Getting that CS degree becomes a bigger deal.

People are launching businesses out of their garage and turning them into global empires.

It kind of changed things.

We went from physical work to cognitive work.

So early on with AI, I was like, okay, is it going to be like electricity where we're going to do largely what we do now, but a little differently?

Or is it going to be like the internet where it's going to change what we do?

And ultimately I landed on, it's going to be like the internet and it's going to move us just like the internet moved us from physical work to cognitive work.

It's going to move us from cognitive work to like relational work.

And so early on, I called it the relationship economy.

Then I called it the innovation economy.

We can get into the latest version of that thinking in the book.