The End of Friction: How AI Flattens the Social Stack of Cognition

The Paradox of Discrete Progress and Continuous Impact For decades, we've observed a peculiar phenomenon in technological progress. The breakthroughs themselves arrive as discrete, "staircase" events—the transistor revolutionizes computing in 1947, the Internet connects the world in the 1990s, transformer architectures emerge in 2017, large language models achieve reasoning capabilities in 2023.…