Static agents age quickly. As deployment environments change and new tools arrive, the agents that survive will be the ones that can safely rewrite themselves.

Overnight, agents can do maybe 200 human hours of work, but only for very agent-shaped tasks, so researchers need to deliberately sequence projects such that very long tasks suitable for agents happen overnight.

Right? You said... No, no, bullshit. Let's write it all down and we can go check it. Let's not argue about what was said. We've got this thing called writing. And once we do that, that means we can make an argument out of a much larger body of evidence than you can ever do in an oral society. It starts killing off stories, because stories don't refer back that much. And so anyway, a key book for people who are wary of McLuhan, to understand this, or one of the key books is by Elizabeth Eisenstein. It's a mighty tome. It's a two volume tome, called the "Printing Press as an Agent of Change." And this is kind of the way to think about it as a kind of catalyst. Because it happened. The printing press did not make the Renaissance happen. The Renaissance was already starting to happen, but it was a huge accelerant for what had already started happening and what Kenneth Clark called Big Thaw.

To be clear, I am not advocating overthrowing the state or any of the other fear-mongering mischaracterizations of anarchism. I am advocating ceasing to spend all of our resources focusing on the state as the agent of the change we seek. We no longer have the time to waste.

That changed with the end of WWII. Waves of discharged soldiers subsidized by the GI Bill, joined by the children of the expanding middle class, wanted or needed a college degree.