AI is slowly becoming more mainstream, but its impact could be exponentially more than a previous revolutionary technology — the computer.
That’s according to Michael Kagan, Chief Technology Officer at NVIDIA, who recently drew a striking comparison that reframes how we should think about artificial intelligence. Riffing on Steve Jobs’ famous metaphor about computers being “bicycles of the mind,” Kagan suggests AI represents something far more transformative: a spaceship. The analogy is particularly apt coming from NVIDIA’s CTO, given the company’s pivotal role in providing the GPU infrastructure that powers the current AI revolution.
“Steve Jobs called computers the bicycle of the mind,” Kagan begins. “So AI is probably a spaceship, because there are a lot of things that I would like to do, but I just don’t have enough time, don’t have enough resources to do it. With AI, I will have it.”
But here’s where Kagan’s perspective gets especially interesting. This isn’t just about doing more work faster. “It doesn’t mean that I will do twice as much. Maybe I will do 10 times as much, but the thing is that I will want to do a hundred times as much as I want to do today,” he explains. It’s a candid acknowledgment of something technologists rarely admit: that every productivity gain simply expands our ambitions rather than freeing up our time.
Kagan extends this observation beyond his own experience. “You go to any project leader and nobody says, ‘I have enough manpower, I have enough resources, I don’t need anymore.’ If you give him resources which are twice as efficient, he will do four times more. And he will want to do 10 times more.”
To illustrate the magnitude of AI’s potential impact, Kagan reaches for a historical parallel. “It’s like electricity changed the world, right? Instead of using, in London you still see this, gas lamps and this infrastructure to use gas as the source of energy. Who could think that once electricity was invented, it would change the world, that we can’t live without electricity? The same with AI.”
The electricity comparison is more than rhetorical flourish. Just as electricity didn’t simply replace gas lamps but enabled entirely new industries—from radio to refrigeration to computing itself—AI is poised to create possibilities we haven’t yet imagined. We’re seeing early evidence of this across industries: companies are increasingly relying on AI for coding, and Goldman Sachs says it can also do IPO paperwork. McKinsey estimates that generative AI could add $2.6 to $4.4 trillion annually to the global economy. But if Kagan is right, these figures may vastly underestimate AI’s impact, because they assume our ambitions remain static. The real transformation will come when AI doesn’t just help us do what we already want to do—it expands the frontier of what we think is possible.