From Printing Press to AI

Is It Really Different This Time?

For any small business or non-profit leader, the relentless barrage of new technology can be exhausting. You are constantly told that the latest app, platform, or gadget is a “game-changer” you must adopt or risk being left behind. Amid this noise, the arrival of generative AI has felt louder and more urgent than anything that has come before. But this raises a big question: Is AI just the next incremental tool to manage, or does it represent a fundamental break from the past?

To answer this, we can’t just look forward - we must also look back. History offers a powerful guide for understanding revolutionary change. By exploring four of history's most disruptive technologies, we can see how each operated on a distinct vector of change, reshaping society in a unique way. This historical lens - examining the printing press, the steam engine, electrification, the internet, and now AI - not only uncovers surprising lessons about their true impact but also reveals why AI operates as a new class of technology altogether.

The Printing Press Didn’t Boost the Economy (At First) - It Rebuilt It From the Ground Up

The 15th-century printing press was a revolution in Information Replication. It broke a clerical and aristocratic monopoly on knowledge, but its arrival reveals a counter-intuitive truth about disruption: economists have found no evidence of its effect in aggregate macroeconomic measures like national productivity. This “productivity paradox” suggests its power wasn’t in making the old economy more efficient, but in creating the foundations for a new one.

Adoption Speed: centuries

The Steam Engine Centralized Everything and Invented Your 9-to-5

While the printing press revolutionized information, the steam engine sparked a revolution in Mechanical Power. Its impact on the organization of society was the opposite of its predecessor. Unlike the decentralizing printing press, the steam engine was a powerful centralizing force that reshaped the world. Its development was driven by a self-reinforcing feedback loop: early engines were invented to pump water out of coal mines, which allowed for the extraction of more coal, which in turn fueled more steam engines.

Adoption Speed: ~ 100+ years

Electrification Unbundled Power and Reconfigured the Factory Floor

If the steam engine was a revolution in generating power, electrification was a revolution in Energy Distribution and Application. Steam was a brute-force, on-site technology. Electricity unbundled power generation from its use, creating a flexible network that was both centralized in production and decentralized in application. This subtle shift completely re-engineered the factory and began to reshape daily life.

Adoption Speed: ~30 – 40 years

The Internet’s Real Power Is Almost Impossible to Measure.

The internet ignited a revolution in global Information Transmission, acting as a great leveler for small and medium-sized businesses. Its impact has been staggering. In the five years leading up to a 2011 study, it accounted for 21% of GDP growth in mature economies. And an increase in internet maturity correlates with a $500 increase in real per capita GDP - an economic gain that took the Industrial Revolution 50 years to achieve. Critically, 75% of this value went to traditional firms, not just tech companies.

Adoption Speed: ~7 – 10 years

AI Is Fundamentally Different: It’s the First Tool That “Thinks”

AI marks a fundamental discontinuity from all previous technologies because it operates on an entirely new vector: the automation of Cognition itself. Historically, technology automated either manual labour or routine cognitive tasks. Generative AI is the first technology to automate non-routine cognitive labour. This collapses a distinction that has been a cornerstone of economic models for decades, radically lowering the cost of “thinking”.

AI is a “meta-technology” - a tool that can help build better tools. This reality is reflected in its unprecedented dynamics:

• Unprecedented Speed: Generative AI reached nearly 40% U.S. adoption in under two years, a rate far faster than the internet (~7-10 years). This was enabled by its deployment on existing infrastructure like the internet and personal computers; the “rails” were already in place.

• Unprecedented Nature: It possesses the potential for Recursive Self-Improvement (RSI), a capacity no previous tool has ever had.

  
  

This final point is the most critical distinction because it represents a break from the linear, human-driven pace of innovation that has defined all of history.

A steam engine cannot design a more efficient steam engine; but an AI will be able to design a more powerful AI.

From Augmenting Action to Automating Thought

The history of technological disruption offers clear lessons. The printing press, a revolution in Information Replication, teaches us about the power of decentralization. The steam engine, a revolution in Mechanical Power, shows how technology can centralize society and redefine work. Electrification, a revolution in Energy Distribution, taught us how unbundling a resource can reconfigure both industry and daily life. The internet, a revolution in Information Transmission, reveals the paradox of a tool that both empowers individuals and creates new centers of power.

While these examples are valuable, they fall short of capturing the transformative nature of AI. Previous technologies were tools designed to augment the physical or communicative abilities of a human agent. AI is the first technology that can automate and scale the Cognitive Agent itself.

What does this highfalutin’ history lesson mean for small businesses and non profit organizations? It’s about a productivity paradox and the historical parallel comes from electrification. For decades after its introduction, economists saw no productivity gains from electrification. The reason was that businesses initially replaced their single, massive steam engine with a single, massive electric motor. They were using revolutionary technology as a simple substitute within an old workflow.

The true revolution - and the massive productivity boom - only occurred when factories were completely redesigned around electricity's unique strengths. By using small, individual electric motors for each machine, they could create the horizontal assembly line, a workflow optimized for process, not for proximity to a central power source.

This is the most critical lesson for small businesses and non-profits today:

• Don’t fall for the “Substitution Trap”: Simply using AI to write emails a bit faster or summarize meeting notes is the equivalent of swapping a steam engine for an electric motor. It's a minor efficiency gain that misses transformative potential.

• The “Re-architecture Opportunity”: The real question is: Now that the cost of generating content, plans, and analysis is approaching zero, what can we do that was previously impossible? This could mean offering personalized services at scale, developing new programs that were too complex to manage before, or redesigning entire workflows to be faster and more creative.

  
  

For a small organization, this means AI is not just another tool to adopt, but a catalyst to fundamentally rethink your entire operational model. AI is, like the internet, “a great leveler”; it gives you access to capabilities that were once reserved only for the large and well-funded. The organizations that thrive will be those that don't just use AI to optimize their old processes, but rather, to invent entirely new ones.

This leaves every business and organization with a big question to consider: Past technologies gave us better tools to work with. What does it mean for our businesses and organizations when the tool itself can work, create, and think alongside us?

Jeff Uhlich

Founder & CEO, augmentus inc.

November 2^nd, 2025