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FIG. 12
Three curves, one timeline
people, companies and governments live at different speeds
Governments — regulation and institutions, long cycles
Each speed, opened
why each one moves at a different rhythm
●
People
Days · weeks
Fastest to adopt, slowest to integrate.
Millions downloaded ChatGPT before their companies had any policy. Surface adoption very fast; deep integration slow. Few have made the leap from using AI as a search engine to integrating it as a real collaborator in their workflow.
ChatGPT: 1M users in 5 days
100M in 2 months
●
Companies
Quarters · years
Stuck in eternal-pilot syndrome.
They start projects enthusiastically, get promising results in controlled environments, and fail to scale them. 90% of AI pilots die before reaching production — not for technical reasons, but for cognitive and cultural brakes.
90% of pilots don't scale
Source · McKinsey
●
Governments
Years · decades
Designed for paces of change that no longer exist.
Their deliberative cycles have a legitimate democratic purpose, but they are extraordinarily slow compared with the speed of technology. GDPR took 4 years to negotiate. When it came into force, the tech ecosystem was already different.
GDPR: 4 years of negotiation
AI Act: similar cycle
The structural problem of the era
Three worlds coexisting at different speeds
Not a temporary problem that solves itself over time. It's the asymmetry that defines the exponential era: at any given moment, people, companies and governments live in different time realities — and that distance is what generates the most visible tensions of the present.
People
are already inside the exponential.
Their organisations
are still operating in the linear.
Governments
haven't finished processing that the previous wave has passed.
"Society innovates first. Laws try to catch up afterwards.»