Time Feels Broken. Perspective Can Fix It.
AI may be the fastest revolution in history—but it only looks sudden if you don't know the timeline.
Everything feels like it's accelerating. That’s because it is. The news cycle churns at light speed, technologies emerge and go mainstream within months, and yesterday's science fiction is today's app update. But without a map, even normal speed feels chaotic.
We're living through what feels like a fracturing of time itself. The steady tick-tock of technological progress has given way to something that feels more like a time-lapse video on 10x speed (I’m good at 1.25x but not 10x!). Nowhere is this more evident than with generative AI, which seems to have materialized from thin air overnight to dominate our headlines, fears, and futures. (Have you read AI2027 yet?)
But here's the thing: AI isn't happening in a vacuum—it sits on a long timeline of breakthroughs that seemed sudden but weren't. The answer isn't panic or hype. It's perspective.
Perspectives from Deep Time
Imagine Earth's 4.5-billion-year history compressed into a 12-hour clock. On this scale:
Life first appears around 4 AM
Dinosaurs show up at 10:30 PM
Humans make their entrance at 11:59:58 PM
AI? In the last 0.0001 seconds
When framed this way, our technological anxieties take on a different light. Dinosaurs ruled the planet for 186 million years (and were wiped out in an instant). Consider this: George Washington didn’t know about dinosaurs. The Internet has been with us for about 50. We may think in headlines, but we live on a geologic scale.
This isn't to minimize the impact of AI—quite the opposite. It's to understand that what feels like a rupture in time is part of a pattern that's been playing out since we first picked up sticks and rocks. The timeline matters because it reveals the arc of how transformative technologies take hold.
The Pattern: Gradual, Then Sudden
The history of revolutionary technologies follows a consistent pattern: decades or centuries of incremental development before a "sudden" breakthrough that captures the public imagination. But that breakthrough is rarely as sudden as it seems.
Take fire. Humans controlled fire for hundreds of thousands of years before we developed regular campfires, cooking, and civilization. Yet in the popular imagination, fire was simply "discovered" in a single eureka moment.
Or writing. It's about 5,000 years old, which means most of human history is pre-literate. The earliest forms were crude accounting tools that took centuries to evolve into expressive communication systems. Writing didn't arrive; it emerged.
The Internet follows the same pattern. ARPANET sent its first message in 1969, but the World Wide Web wasn't invented until 1989, and most people didn't go online until the mid-1990s. "The Computer" was named Time Person of the Year in 1982. My first job “on the Internet” was in 1994. Back then, there were only about 3,000 websites on the entire web. Getting to where we are today was a multi-decade project.
And AI? Far from being a 2022 invention when ChatGPT burst onto the scene, it's the product of over 70 years of computer science research. The term "artificial intelligence" was coined in 1956. Neural networks date back to the 1940s. The "deep learning revolution" that powers today's AI began in earnest around 2012. What seems like an overnight sensation has been slowly cooking for generations.
Why AI Feels So Fast
If it’s taken AI decades to develop, why does it feel like a sudden invasion? Three reasons:
Feedback loops have compressed dramatically. New technologies once took centuries to spread (agriculture), then decades (electricity), then years (personal computers). AI models now improve in quarters or even weeks (days?). We've collapsed the deployment-improvement cycle to a timeframe that feels instantaneous to our primate brains.
There's a massive gap between visibility and readiness. We can all instantly see and interact with ChatGPT, but our infrastructure, policy frameworks, ethical guidelines, and educational systems all lag. It's like getting the nuclear bomb before radiation protocols. Or streaming video before broadband. Moreover, Enterprises are not ready, and if we’re being honest, the human race isn’t either. Automating workflows with pre-AI tools hasn’t been smooth so what makes us think autonomous programs will get it right out of the gate?
We suffer from a severe case of presentism, judging AI solely by today's fears rather than history's patterns. Every major technology arrives with both apocalyptic predictions and utopian promises. Neither tends to accurately capture the complex reality that unfolds. We are about to see that play out.
Why Perspective on AI Matters Now
The timeline gives us something essential: escape from false binaries. It's not "AGI tomorrow" versus "this is just a fad." It's a continuum, moving at a particular pace, with recognizable patterns. It will happen slowly like everything, and then suddenly all at once as the quote sort of goes.
Historical grounding builds resilience. We've faced seismic shifts before—the printing press upended information control, germ theory transformed medicine and cities, and the Industrial Revolution rewrote the relationship between humans and work. This moment is different in speed, not necessarily in kind.
What to Do With This Perspective
Calibrate, don't catastrophize. We need urgency. Compressed cycles are real, but we also need discernment. Not every AI advance is an existential threat, and not every limitation is permanent.
Start asking better questions. Not just "What can AI do?" but "Where are we on the timeline?" Not just "Will AI take my job?" but "What kind of time horizon does this shift demand?"
The most valuable outcome of the temporal perspective is emotional regulation (my therapist agrees). A clear-eyed view of time lets us move forward with better judgment—neither dismissive of legitimate concerns nor paralyzed by speculative fears.
For Leaders*: Operate in Multiple Timeframes Simultaneously
CEOs and organizational leaders face a particularly acute version of the AI timeline dilemma. The market rewards quarterly performance, but disruption unfolds over years. Media cycles demand instant positions on AI, but building truly integrated AI capabilities requires sustained, methodical investment.
The leaders who will navigate this transition most effectively are those who can operate across multiple timeframes simultaneously:
The 90-day horizon demands quick wins and tangible AI implementations that show stakeholders you're not asleep at the wheel. But beware of the trap of performative AI. Chatbots and automation may look impressive but create little durable value. Beware Goodhart’s Law and mistaking activity for demonstrable progress. Don’t stress over scaling and instead, look for and find stuff you can measure and improve.
The 18-month horizon is where strategic advantage is built. This is the timeframe for developing a coherent AI strategy that connects to your core business model—not just adopting AI tools, but reimagining workflows, customer experiences, and decision processes. It’s here where you can experiment with purpose and gleefully ignore AI hypesters on social media.
The 5-year horizon is where vision meets resilience. Organizations that will thrive won't just adapt to AI; they'll build adaptability itself into their DNA. This is very hard to do. It also means investing in talent that can bridge human and machine intelligence, developing a learning infrastructure, and creating governance models that can evolve with the technology. AI Literacy is perhaps the most important skill set to foster in your people.
Here's the paradox leaders must embrace: Companies that survive will move fast enough to capture immediate AI opportunities while moving deliberately enough to build sustainable and scalable capabilities. They'll neither overcommit to today's AI paradigm (which will inevitably evolve) nor underinvest out of excessive caution.
It’s like that song, I’m a Believer**:
What's the use in trying?
All you get is pain
When I wanted sunshine I got rain
The winning approach (as with a lot of things) is likely to be a portfolio strategy—making concurrent bets across multiple time horizons while maintaining flexibility to adjust as the technology, and societal landscape shifts. It’s time to place your bets on how far the Overton Window will shift. Just as you wouldn't put your entire investment portfolio into a single volatile stock, don't stake your organization's future on a single AI platform, vision or timeline.
Fire wasn't just a tool; it was the foundation for civilization. Same for electricity. And the Internet itself. The companies that will thrive won't just use AI tools; they'll build new organizational foundations around them.
The Timeline is the Tool
Perspective isn't passivity. It's preparation. Understanding our place in the long arc of technological evolution doesn't diminish the significance of this moment; it enhances our ability to navigate it wisely.
Technologies don't arrive like in the movies. They emerge from specific historical conditions, develop along recognizable patterns, and integrate into society through complex processes of adaptation and resistance. AI isn't magic. It's the latest chapter in humanity's oldest story: our relationship with the tools we create.
If the Internet was yesterday and fire was a million years ago, maybe today is less of a collapse and more of a crossing. AI didn't come out of nowhere. It came out of time.
* Myself included!
** I’ll go with the Smash Mouth version. Big Shrek fan.