Power, in the good sense

The word I have settled on for the feeling in ideas stop waiting is power. Not in the sense the word usually carries, power over someone, but in the plain sense: being capable of doing something, having possibilities, having a moat of your own. Through the AI services anyone can subscribe to, we became powerful.

It is an uncomfortable choice of word at first, and the longer I sit with it the more I like it. We have trained ourselves to hear power only as hierarchy, and to look for a victim in every arrangement that has some. This is a kind of power nobody took from anyone. It was not redistributed; it was created, and handed out to whoever cared to learn it. Capability is power, and it is a relief to say so without apology. It is the capability of one person directing many hands, which is what sixteen agents under one manager turned out to be about. What makes it more than a personal feeling is that the capability is democratised, which is where the interesting consequences start.