People keep debating AGI timelines. Are we a model away or a century out? The framing misses the point. Humanity has always been in takeoff mode.

Progress has been exponential for millennia. Exponentials look flat until the base gets big enough to notice, then suddenly they seem vertical. But the curve was the same all along.

Civilization is young. Modern humans: 300,000 years. Agriculture: 10,000. Writing: 5,000. The Industrial Revolution: 300. On an evolutionary clock, that’s nothing. We’ve gone from stone tools to GPUs in a blink.

People talk about Moore’s Law like it started with chips, but the doubling pattern has been around forever. Crop yields, energy output, trade networks, communication speed all have followed it. Knowledge compounds. Once it starts, it doesn’t stop.

The wheel wasn’t random genius. It was part of the same curve. Shape wood, notice rolling logs, build an axle. Step by step, same structure as semiconductors.

Every generation thinks it’s living through the singular moment. They’re all right. Progress only makes sense in context. What we’re building now stands on thousands of years of iteration.

That’s what motivates me to work hard. We’re not standing on the edge of history. We’re riding the curve our predecessors started. The best way to honor it is to keep building.