Phone in the Truck

Why I think we’re nowhere near as far along on the AI curve as it feels.

I’m old enough to remember the time before cell phones.

I had a phone on my desk at work. I had a phone at home, the one with the long curly cord, attached to an answering machine that I rewound by pressing a tiny tape down with my thumb. That was the communication stack. That was it.  Different numbers, different functions.

Then I got my first cell phone. And it wasn’t really a phone, not the way you’re picturing it. It was a handset bolted to the console of my Chevy S-10, right next to the gear shift. A cord ran from the back of it down into the dash for power. The buttons were on the back of the handset. You could pick it up and put it to your ear like a regular phone, or you could leave it cradled and hit speaker.

I thought I had arrived.

For the first time in my life, the dead hours of a commute became productive hours. Driving to a meeting, driving to a sporting event, driving home late, I could communicate. I told everyone I knew that this thing had changed my productivity forever.

It had. It just wasn’t what I thought it was.

Every stage looked like the peak from the inside

Then Nokia happened. The flip phone. The bar of soap phone. Auto-answer with a headset jack, which felt like science fiction, because now I didn’t even have to reach into my pocket. If it rang, I started talking. Productivity unlocked. Again.

Then keyboards. BlackBerry. Windows Mobile. Email in my hand. I remember thinking, this is it, this is the force multiplier. What more could you possibly need?

Then the iPhone. Apps. Then data, slow and unreliable at first, but a web browser in your pocket, which was a concept that had not existed before. Then real apps. Then Bluetooth, which we all made fun of until every single one of us was wearing it. Then video calls. Then maps that knew where you were. Then a bank in your pocket. Then a camera better than the one in my closet.

At every single one of those stops, I thought we had arrived.

I was wrong every single time.

The phone in my truck and the phone in my pocket today are not the same product. They are not the same category. They are barely the same species. And the version of me sitting in that truck in 1992 could not have described to you what the device in my pocket is today, because the words for it did not yet exist.

Now look at AI

I have a fleet of agents working for me right now.

One of them triages my inbox before I’m awake. One of them rewrites my drafts. One of them sits on my calendar and resolves conflicts before I see them, then sends me a morning report telling me what it moved and why. One of them builds dashboards on demand. One of them runs a weekly report on how many tokens I burned, how many artifacts got produced, and a rough estimate of how many hundreds of thousands of dollars of human effort would have been required to do all of that two years ago.

I am, by any reasonable measure, more productive than I have ever been.

And every time I demo a piece of this to someone, the reaction is the same. This is incredible. This is the future. We must be so close to the peak.

I keep wanting to agree with them. I have lived inside the productivity gain. I know what it feels like.

But I’ve been through this movie before.

We’re in the S-10

We are not at the iPhone moment of AI. We are not at the BlackBerry moment of AI. I don’t think we’re at the Nokia moment of AI.

I think we’re at the phone in the truck.

I think the version of AI my kids are going to use in a decade is going to be as unrecognizable to us, sitting here in 2026, as a modern smartphone would have been to me sitting in my truck in 1992. The words for it don’t exist yet. The form factor for it doesn’t exist yet. The social patterns for it don’t exist yet. We don’t even have the right complaints yet, and complaints are usually a leading indicator that a category is mature.

The exponential nature of this curve fools us. It feels like we’re moving so fast we must be near the end, when in reality the speed is the tell that we’re near the beginning. Things move fastest when they have the most room left to run.

The fact that the pace has compressed does not invalidate the pattern. It just means we’re going to see the next several stages inside a single career instead of across three of them.

So when somebody asks me where we are on the AI curve, I have a real answer now.

I’m in the truck. The cord goes into the dash. The handset is next to the gear shift. And I am absolutely certain I have arrived, in exactly the way I was certain the last four times.

Your turn

Where do you think we are on the AI curve? Phone in the truck? Nokia flip? BlackBerry? Early iPhone? Something later?

Drop your honest answer in the comments. Bonus points if you can name the feature you’re using today that will look as quaint in ten years as a handset bolted to a dashboard looks now.

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Lessons from doing, not theorizing.