I went looking for a historical case.
I had one.
Bell.
The Bell System had contained a great many functions inside one organization. After the breakup, those functions separated, combined, moved into other companies and eventually became parts of industries that were difficult to follow from inside the old structure.
Then I found semiconductors.
Before the 1980s, semiconductor companies were largely vertically integrated. They designed chips, developed the manufacturing process, owned the fabrication plants, and handled assembly and testing.
Then two things began moving in opposite directions.
Fabrication became more expensive.
Design became more separable from fabrication.
Better design tools made it increasingly possible to develop a chip without owning the factory that would manufacture it.
A function that had lived inside the integrated company could leave.
Small companies began designing chips and buying unused manufacturing capacity from companies that still owned fabs.
Then, in 1987, TSMC was founded to do something narrower.
Manufacture other companies’ chips.
It did not need to design chips of its own. In fact, its neutrality was part of its usefulness. It could receive designs from companies that competed with one another because it did not compete with them in design.
A new kind of company had become useful.
Fabless.
Foundry.
Later, packaging and testing separated further into specialized firms.
And something else appeared between them.
Once design and manufacturing belonged to different companies, work that had once happened inside a single organization had to happen across an interface. The two sides needed standards, process information and coordination.
A function separates.
A new relationship appears.
The relationship creates work of its own.
That was the case I had been looking for.
No court had to break the company apart.
Capacity changed.
A function became separable from the structure that used to contain it.
The industry reorganized around the separation.
That does not prove that AI will do the same thing to a writers’ studio.
The semiconductor activities were already different activities. Designing a chip and fabricating one are not the same job. Three writers leaving a studio do what the writers who remain are still doing.
They may compete.
They may collaborate.
They may specialize.
We do not know.
But that was also the point of the original argument.
AI does not make the decision.
People do.
I had reached for Bell because I knew it.
Then I kept looking.
There was a better case.
WE&P by: EZorrillaMc&Co.
