We Live Like Royalty, and AI Is the Next Cathedral.

Last weekend, I came across an opinion piece that fascinated me: We live like royalty and we don’t know it, by Charles C. Mann.

In the piece, the journalist tells this story: former US president Thomas Jefferson, one of the richest and most influential men of his era, had a serious problem caused by the constant cold in his house… the ink in his pen kept freezing!

That tells you how different life was in the 18th century. Central heating? Unimaginable. Reliable drinking water? An impossible challenge. Food abundance? A dream. And here we are today, losing our minds over an app that crashes, slightly slow Wi-Fi, or street snow removal that takes too long.

What Mann points out is that we now enjoy collective infrastructure (water, electricity, public health, transportation) so efficient that we forget all its complexity. We live like royalty compared to Jefferson, but we don’t always realize that this comfort rests on massive systems, built over decades, even centuries.

Today, I see we’re living through exactly the same thing with artificial intelligence. We’re building a new generation of “cathedrals,” and we’re roughly at the stage where electricity had only just produced its very first light bulbs.

Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, put it well when he said he sees AI as a more significant invention than electricity or fire. That fits perfectly with the idea that we’re on the verge of a revolution on the same scale as the modern infrastructure we benefit from today and take for granted.

The new “chores” about to be automated

In the 19th century, only the ultra-wealthy could afford servants to do their laundry and cooking for them. Today, almost everyone has access to a washing machine, a microwave, Uber Eats, and so on. We’ve automated what used to be a chore.

Same principle with AI: a writer can use ChatGPT to generate a first draft, an art director can run a few prompts through MidJourney to get visuals. Certain repetitive tasks (research, proofreading, design variations) become a prompt that gives us an instant result.

And when we see AI advancing at full speed, we tell ourselves that eventually, with AI agents, we’ll reach an unprecedented level of comfort for our intellectual tasks — the same thing electricity did for our manual ones.

The very start of the AI era: watching history repeat itself

We’re already seeing a “Cambrian explosion” of AI: applications in every sector, companies using it to automate their processes, creators playing with MidJourney, Runway, and the like to design entire worlds.

It’s a bit like the early 20th century, when less than 1% of American families owned a car in 1907, and ten years later, more than half of them did. Same lightning-fast trajectory. And twenty years from now, there’s a good chance AI will be so woven into our routines that we’ll see it as the equivalent of a tap of drinking water: something we turn on automatically, without really thinking about it.

Cathedrals don’t hold themselves up

Thomas Jefferson may have dreamed of a warmer stove, but he couldn’t have imagined today’s engineering “miracles.” In the same way, we may marvel at ChatGPT, but we’re far from grasping the complexity behind these models. We’re talking about servers consuming an exponential amount of energy, gigantic neural networks, colossal amounts of data that need to be secured and constantly updated. It’s precision machinery, much like our water systems, road snow removal, and high-voltage power lines. And just as with our physical infrastructure, we only notice how important it is when there’s a breakdown or an incident.

Of course, this comes with its share of challenges. We’re a bit like at the earliest stage of water distribution: pipes need to be checked, potability needs to be ensured. With AI, that means staying alert to the information it produces, learning to guide it with precise prompts (otherwise, we end up with nonsense). In short, we’re going to have to maintain this new infrastructure, monitor it, and refine it.

In his article, Charles C. Mann insists: if we want our infrastructure to last, we need to invest in it, understand it, improve it. Same goes for AI. Between questions of copyright, monopolies, regulation, and ethics, we’re clearly in the phase where the groundwork needs to be laid. Back when electricity was taking off, laws had to be passed to govern its distribution and use. We’re at that same point with AI: Who owns the data? How do we compensate creators when a model is trained on millions of works? Where does intellectual property stop?

Don’t lose sight of what matters

What’s fascinating is that despite these challenges, AI already offers an insane ease of use. Just as we don’t need to understand the physics of alternating current to turn on a light, we don’t need to master machine learning to use ChatGPT. In just a few clicks, we get access to creative, informational, and strategic capabilities that would have taken us hours to build on our own. As with our modern systems, the complexity is under the hood. But we need to stay aware that it exists — that there’s human genius, energy, and a massive investment behind it.

And maybe that’s the strongest parallel with Mann’s article: becoming aware of the value of what we have. We live in extraordinary comfort thanks to infrastructure inherited from the past, and we’re now building new foundations for future generations.

Understanding the scope of this AI revolution is the first step toward making something positive out of it. As Mann says, if we want to avoid the ink freezing in our pen again, we’re going to have to maintain — and above all… understand — our modern cathedrals.