May 23, 2026 Paid subscribers
When the Lights Come On
What life looks like when AI becomes electricity
We don’t remember learning to stop marveling at electric light. There was no ceremony when the wonder became wallpaper. At some point, somewhere between Edison’s demonstrations and your grandfather flipping on the kitchen light at 6am without a thought, electricity stopped being a technology and became a condition. It became the air inside which modern life breathed. You no longer thought about it. You only noticed it when it was gone.
That is where AI is going. The question is not whether. The question is when, and what we will have lost or gained by the time we arrive.
Maurice Conti, one of the people who has been thinking carefully about this longer than most, calls it the fourth wave. After the excitement of the novel output, after the grassroots productivity gains, after the age of autonomous agents acting on our behalf, comes something quieter and more total. AI as electricity. Ubiquitous. Invisible. The infrastructure inside which everything else runs.