Paul Ford
Writer and co-founder of Aboard, who has published essays and stories on Ftrain.com since 1997 and writes about software, AI and vibe coding.
“It is the biggest thing in my life in terms of tech, but I just don't think it's as radical as like suddenly you can talk to anyone in the world.”
Rosenfeld Review Podcast · User Experience · May 2026
Paul compares AI with the arrival of the telephone. Before the phone, he says, life in a Jane Austen novel was going down the road and coming back; then you could call someone 40 miles away. He grants that AI is new, vast and spreading faster than anything before it, and still ranks the phone system as the more radical change.
Transcript
No, it's not. And that part's really hard. And the only non-violent revolution way to deal with that is the legislative process. And that's slow and it is not aligned with this level of change, even when it works.
That's right.
And it's global and it's different from country to country. The world's never seen anything like this. But, you know, you were talking earlier about the phone system. That was more radical. That was more radical. Like, I didn't have to, if you read like a Jane Austen novel, all they do is go down the street. They go down the road, they come back. They go down the road, they come back. And that's it. That's your whole life. Is you go to somebody's house and you have a little dance and then you get sick and then you go back to the other house and life happens around that. And now you could call and someone like 40 miles away, like a day or two, you could say, hey, what's it like on the other side of the mountain? And they'd be like, cold, right? That's just amazing. Like that, humanity had never seen anything like that. Humanity has seen a lot of things kind of like this, like things that answered questions when you typed in the box and so on. Just not, this is, it is new and it is vast and it does have a billion people in it faster than anything else. The speed is wild. But I think the foundational changes to our life, like literally, you would walk down the street and there were wires everywhere and suddenly everyone in the world was connected for the very first time through the wires. And this has been radical, but it's nowhere near that radical. It is the biggest thing in my life in terms of tech, but I just don't think it's as radical as like suddenly you can talk to anyone in the world.
And hey, listen, you know, you and I have lived through mobile. We've lived through the advent of the web and some other things. And we're still here.
We are. I think it's just so, it's hard to imagine. You know, also, I just kind of thought that we were done. You know, I looked at Bitcoin. I was like, all right, it's a nice swing for the fences there, fellas. NFTs. Yeah, exactly. NFTs, you're going to burn a lot of cycles. You'll try to create scarcity where there isn't. And I really did think it was kind of a little bit over, right? There wasn't any new revolution in tech that was on the way. And blockchain stuff just felt like such a swing and a mist to me from a tech point of view, maybe not from people from an economic point of view, but from a tech point of view, I'm like, you're wasting beautiful CPU cycles. Don't do it. They're too valuable. You could be making pictures. And now we do have something that truly is eating all the CPU cycles it could, but it's doing all sorts of new things. So I don't know. I really, I didn't see it coming.
Well, all right. We got to wrap up, but I am, you've already given us your gift, so that's good. Even though it was earlier, I don't hold it against you too much. I'm a bad boy. Bad boy. I'm going to put you on the spot talking about language. Is there a word that kind of sums up how you feel about where we are at this point when it comes to AI? One word.
More from Rosenfeld Review Podcast
