Ten Days That Didn’t Shake the World: Is it 1905 in AI Time?
About this episode
Keith Teare discusses the current state of AI and its historical parallels, suggesting that while change is imminent, it has not yet fully manifested in the economy.
Will 2026 be one of those grand historical years that change the world — like 1917, 1789 or 1968? Not according to Keith Teare , publisher of That Was The Week newsletter and co-host of our weekly tech roundup. For Keith, the best historical analogy is 1905, the year of the first abortive Russian revolution. The year that didn’t change the world. Keith’s latest tech newsletter asks “What Time Is It?” His answer is that we have “multiple clocks” — micro and macro, short, medium, and long term to make sense of our current AI moment. This week, for example, OpenAI and Anthropic both shipped work-focused products, and most of the world hasn’t noticed. Thus his allusion to 1905. We are on the brink of massive change. But nothing is going to change. Not quite yet. Until everything does. Five Takeaways • It's 1905 in the AI Economy. Keith's answer to the what-time-is-it question is the failed Russian revolution — the moment when the variables of transformation were all in motion but nothing was yet visible, and which took seventy years to fully play out. AI's radical change is real, he argues, but it is being experienced by a small number of people and is not yet generalized through the…
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