From Sharpening Sticks to AI: 20 Breakthroughs that Changed Everything

The first group of people who changed the world sharpened sticks.
They turned intention into leverage. A sharpened stick is proto–product design: extend reach, concentrate force, repeat the result. It transformed a neutral object into a tool.

The second group of people who changed the world harnessed the power of fire.
Energy on demand. Heat meant cooked food (more calories, bigger brains), safety, light, metallurgy—and the possibility of night work and winter survival.

The third group of people who changed the world developed language.
Now ideas could compound. Memory leapt from neurons to networks. Coordination scaled past the size of a family.

The fourth group of people who changed the world created communities.
Tribes became villages; shared norms became culture; specialization appeared. With trust and trade, 1+1 started equaling 11.

The fifth group domesticated plants and animals.
Agriculture produced surplus. Surplus produced cities. Cities produced administrators, artisans, soldiers, and scholars—and the first real “free time” to invent. One of the early ancestors of Marc Andreessen first thought the thought, “Builders Build.”

The sixth group invented numbers and writing.
Clay tablets, tallies, scripts. We moved knowledge out of fragile human memory into durable external media. Accounting, law, history, and institutions followed.

The seventh group mastered wheels, sails, and metal.
Motion and materials multiplied muscle. Bronze and iron tools, carts and ships—technology that expanded radius, reach, and resiliency.

The eighth group created markets, money, and credit.
Coins, ledgers, banking. Value became portable, divisible, and storable—fuel for long-distance trade and long-term projects.

The ninth group formalized the scientific method.
Hypothesis, test, replication. Authority lost its monopoly; evidence earned it. This unlocked centuries of compounding insight.

The tenth group industrialized power.
Steam engines, factories, interchangeable parts. Productivity exploded; costs collapsed; the average human lifespan began its great climb.

The eleventh group electrified the world.
Wires carried light, work, and information. Motors, appliances, and the grid reimagined homes, offices, and cities.

The twelfth group contracted distance.
Railways, internal combustion, flight. Supply chains became global; ideas hitchhiked on people and products.

The thirteenth group connected minds at light speed.
Telegraph to telephone to fiber optics and satellites. Then the internet essentially created a planetary nervous system.

The fourteenth group developed social media platforms.                                                                                                        Initially this had far-reaching impact, as a giant step forward. It truly made good on the internet’s promise to make the world a global village, fueled social movements, and brought the best and brightest minds into our consciousness simply by following their accounts. As the technology advanced, the progression became regression. Social media made the economic model of news journalism unsustainable, and dramatically increased the distribution of prejudice, hate, and fear, leading to increasing isolation and polarization. We created the algorithms and now the algorithms are creating us.

The fifteenth group created blockchain and cryptocurrency.
They established the first decentralized trust architecture—immutable ledgers without central control. From Bitcoin to Ethereum—specifically excluding MLM crypto scams, shit coins, and questionable NFTs—they birthed programmable money, trustless contracts, and a new frontier for finance, governance, and data integrity. Soon, instead of investing in worthless or overhyped tokens, we will be investing in the crypto version of stocks, commodities, and bonds.  Satoshi, Vitalik, and Balaji guide us through the jungle.

The sixteenth group turned information into computation.
From Turing’s abstractions to silicon, software, and the cloud. We automated arithmetic, then administration, then entire industries.

The seventeenth group read and edited life itself.
Genomics, recombinant DNA, CRISPR. Biology became programmable—medicine shifted from reactive to increasingly precise and proactive. (Taking us to custom designing babies from a menu, as I suggested in my Mad Genius book.) This led us from lifespan to health span, to the proponents of life extension and even immortality, through doctors like Peter Attia, and entrepreneurs such as Tim Ferriss and Bryan Johnson.

The eighteenth group stepped off-world.
Rockets, satellites, GPS. Space became the vantage point for weather, communication, navigation—and the canvas for our next logistics layer. People like Elon, Elon, and Elon.

The nineteenth group began decarbonizing energy.
Solar, wind, storage, fission/fusion research, smarter grids. Abundant clean energy is the master key for prosperity without plunder. This is where I believe Jeff Bezos makes his biggest contribution to our advancement, a good deal of it possibly through asteroid mining.

The twentieth group…the NEXT group who change the world will employ AI. Because you can forget all those dramatic, fear mongering takes on how millions and millions of jobs and even entire industries will be disrupted by AI.  They’re all too conservative. The real number is in the billions.

One of my partners wrote me the other day expressing concern that he was spending too much time studying AI right now. I replied that right now, I thought that was not possible. The greatest danger now is spending too little time studying AI. This is the group you want to be in.

Peace,

- RG

P.S. For your knowledge and appropriate context: I wrote this essay with the help of an AI agent I’ve programmed on ChatGPT 5.0 to think and speak like me. It was trained using my last three books and 50 blogs, as well as some recent podcasts.  I started the essay by writing the first four groups of people and the final one, then asked the agent to fill in the middle, and fact check the chronological order of my first four. It responded with the following comments: “Love the premise. Your first four are already in a solid chronological sequence—toolmaking predates controlled fire; language blooms later; durable communities cohere once language exists—so I’ll keep them in that order and build forward.”  You have to admit, that level of cognitive intuition is astounding!

It then suggested an essay with 18 groups total.  I felt that to be relevant to my thesis, it required two additional groups, which I then added: social media, and blockchain/cryptocurrency. (I also contemplated deeply about adding the group who developed frosted pop tarts and the cheesy gordita crunch, but ultimately ruled that out as being too self-centric.) The illustration was created in ChatGPT using the image generator pro app.  I tweaked here and there, and what you read is the result.

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