This week I stumbled across a news item: Nvidia booked $26 billion in revenue in one quarter for chips delivered against the promise of future computing capacity. The payment wasn't made with money but with cloud credits for future resources.
It's not so much the number that caught my attention but the pattern behind it. Historians like to speak of the "long 19th century" when they want to describe the epoch from 1789 to 1914 with a zeitgeist characterized by an unwavering belief in unlimited progress and its infinite possibilities.
The news of Nvidia reminded me, that the railroad was financed back then with the same promise of future profits. And although the miracle of overcoming time and space at unprecedented speed has brought no lasting material gains to this day, the railroad nevertheless transformed Western societies.
A dream that doesn't die
Also in the 19th century, Parisian doctors began to view aging as a disease, with the desire to transcend the earthly limitations of humans through medical progress, not in the afterlife but already on earth. The natural course of our lives thus became something that must be fought against. How deeply this notion gripped society at the time is shown among other things by Maxim Gorky with his God-Builders movement, which wanted to abolish death.
Today we have Sam Altman, who finances a longevity startup, and Bryan Johnson, who subjects himself to a radical biohacking protocol. We have a renewed promise that AI will soon make human intelligence redundant. We have the belief that consciousness could be uploaded to a computer, and Elon Musk, who equips cars with chips to expand human cognition.
What if the real question isn't how to overcome our limits, but what we create within them?
Every age has its version of this dream: that the right technology, applied with enough ambition, will finally free us from the constraints that have always defined human life. Time. Space. The body. Death itself.
What the pattern suggests
The railroad didn't deliver on its financial promise. Most early investors lost everything. But it changed how humans moved, thought, and organized society in ways no one predicted. The 19th century belief in progress wasn't wrong. It was just aimed at the wrong outcomes.
I wonder if we're in the same moment now. The AI hype may or may not deliver its financial returns. The longevity bets may or may not pan out. But something will shift, not because the technology achieves what it promises, but because pursuing the promise changes the people doing the pursuing.
That seems worth paying attention to. Not to predict the future, but to ask: what kind of people are we becoming in the meantime?