From the Moon Landing to the Office Chatbot: What Six Decades of Computing Teach Us About AI Adoption
When Neil Armstrong stepped onto the Moon in July 1969, the machine that helped get him there fit inside a cabinet the size of a small suitcase, weighed about 32 kilograms, and worked with roughly the same memory as a pocket calculator. Fifty-odd years later, a far more powerful chip sits unnoticed in the phone in your pocket, running apps that summarise emails, translate conversations, and now increasingly draft, analyse, and decide. The interesting story here isn’t that computers got smaller and faster — everyone already knows that. It’s that computing kept moving closer to ordinary life, decade after decade, until it stopped being a tool people reached for and became the environment they operate in. Artificial intelligence is the latest, and possibly the most disruptive, stage of that migration — and understanding the earlier stages tells us a lot about what will actually determine whether AI pays off.
