Steam-engine lineage
Seven stages, two centuries: thermodynamics, statistics, quantum mechanics, semiconductors, information systems — AI is the direct child of the industrial revolution.
The steam-engine lineage is the historical reading the manifesto proposes to situate AI in the long term. AI is not a rupture that emerged out of nowhere in 2022 — it is the direct culmination of a causal chain that begins with the domestication of steam, around 1769 (Watt’s engine).
The seven stages
- Steam — Watt, late eighteenth century.
- Thermodynamics — Carnot, Clausius, early nineteenth century.
- Statistical laws applied to matter — Boltzmann, late nineteenth century.
- Quantum mechanics — flowing from black-body radiation, early twentieth century.
- Semiconductors — practical applications of quantum mechanics, 1940s.
- Information systems — secondary to the birth of transistors and computation, second half of the twentieth century.
- Artificial intelligence — a cognitive layer added to the informational layer, 2020s.
Yann Le Cun gladly recalls this thread. At each stage, contemporaries believed they were dealing with nothing but a local problem. No one, in 1820, could see that the analysis of a boiler’s efficiency contained in germ the cognitive noosphere of 2026.
Neither destiny nor chance
This reading might suggest a historical necessity. The manifesto takes care to reject that interpretation: no Omega Point was drawing the chain forward. What guided it were local resonances between effective needs and capacities to respond, accumulated over two centuries, and shared fictions (the dream of the automaton, Leibniz’s universal calculus, Babbage’s machines, Turing’s thoughts) that oriented efforts without determining them.
Consequence
This reading changes the scope of the present moment. We are not facing one innovation among others. We are at the point where the industrial revolution, after two centuries of underground maturation, accomplishes what it carried without knowing it: a second stage, in which the machine ceases to augment force in order to augment thought.
And this reading is inseparable from the ecological diagnosis: the same chain that produces AI has also produced climate dysregulation and the sixth extinction. This is what the manifesto calls the double crisis.