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garymar's avatar

Very interesting!

Small error in wording: "I’m sanguine about this new paradigm’s prospects, despite excitement and money flying around..."

Not sanguine, but it's opposite, pessimistic.

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Ben Reinhardt's avatar

Oh good catch -- thank you. I flipped a bit in my head when I wrote it apparently

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Reality Drift Archive's avatar

Feels analogous to sensemaking. When a system saturates, more optimization just adds epicycles. The breakthrough is a new organizing model that makes the complexity legible again.

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RDM's avatar

Adjacent thought -- this article, already rich and good, would benefit from the meta-view of 'evolution' outlined in Kenneth Stanley's "Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned".

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PAtwater's avatar

Nice piece sir... you might enjoy this missive looking at how to create more conducive enabling conditions for this leapfrogging in California: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7401480739223191552/

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Synthetic Civilization's avatar

Strong framing. One thing I’d add: manufacturing paradigms don’t just shift because of tools, they shift when coordination capacity changes.

New cells, tooling-free processes, and feedback loops only become dominant once institutions, capital, labor, and legitimacy can move in sync.

The hard part isn’t building the tech, it’s crossing the coordination threshold that lets a new system survive long enough to scale.

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