The Hinge Generation

“There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come.”

—Victor Hugo

Some of us were born and raised right there — on that threshold where what existed wasn’t necessarily old, and the new could barely speak. We used, at the same time, blackboards written on with white chalk — not whiteboards with fiber-tip markers — and a Commodore 64. We sent handwritten letters (by postal mail, the kind that required stamps), but we also exchanged floppy disks with games, went to TI-99/4A user group meetings (we went in person — not "remotely" or "from home"), and we felt like hackers, crackers, phreakers...

We were kids playing chess against computers that barely understood the rules. We copied code from programs printed in magazines like Microhobby or K64, not fully understanding what each line did, but through sheer repetition — copying and testing — we eventually learned.

We talked to Eliza, a proto-ChatGPT that simulated a kind of understanding on a home computer.

And we started to believe. We started to believe that, one day, a machine would truly understand us. And that faith wasn’t spiritual — it was technical.

And when we say “we started to believe,” we’re not referring to today’s fashionable collective psychosis — this idea that ChatGPT is a portal for extraterrestrial communication, or a digitized God (the Word itself, tokenized). No.

We had technical faith. Fides technica, if you want to say it in Latin — it has a nice ring to it. A sincere, practical kind of trust, based on what we saw with our own eyes. Because technology delivered. And not only delivered: it amazed. It exceeded expectations.

We were there when Bill Gates promised “a computer on every desk” — and the son of a bitch did it.

We were there when Steve Jobs said he’d “put a thousand songs in your pocket” — and the son of a bitch did that too.

We didn’t believe out of blind faith. We believed because it was happening. Because the impossible was becoming tangible right before our eyes.

In the ’70s and ’80s, technology didn’t inspire fear — it inspired excitement. The future seemed manageable, even friendly, stimulating, promising. Like a nerdy friend: clumsy, but brilliant.

The Space Shuttle was invented, and we called it “the space taxi,” because we were told that in the future we’d be able to call an Uber to the Moon.

We devoured the future with fries. We believed the year 2000 would bring flying cars and colonies on Mars.

And even though not all of that came to pass (not yet, anyway), what did happen was just as incredible.

WarGames wasn’t just another movie. It introduced a new kind of hero: a kid with a dial-up modem (an acoustic coupler, look it up) beat the Pentagon and saved humanity from extinction. And he got the girl.

We all wanted to be David Lightman — and every single one of us from that generation used “JOSHUA” as a password at some point.

Then came Terminator 2. And The Lawnmower Man — terrible movie, unforgettable concept: a digitally expanded mind.

Our generation started to see something adults couldn’t: that intelligence might not always have a human shape. We were already reading articles on artificial intelligence — and we can assure you, those articles weren’t written with help from an AI, simply because AIs didn’t exist yet. And those articles were typed on typewriters and printed in paper magazines (because nothing else existed).

And we understood quite a bit. Not everything — but enough.

We didn’t know how an LLM worked — at age 12, we had no idea what backpropagation was — but we could sense that something big was about to explode.

The ideas were there. The theory worked. What we lacked was computing power — hardware — the muscle.

And then, other heroes of the nerd Olympus appeared: the gamers.

The GPU as the New Prometheus

Graphics cards — the ones gamers bought to make Quake, Doom, or Half-Life run better — ended up being the engines of the future.

Gamer culture — that tribe bullied for decades — brought down the cost of parallel computing and put it on our desks.

To understand the evolution and mass adoption of AI (or at least its more accessible aspects, like GPTs or some diffusion models), you can’t just look at Stanford or DARPA. You also have to look in a 2000s cybercafé. At a LAN party in someone’s living room, kept alive by Red Bull and Monster. At the kids who overclocked their PCs to squeeze out 8 more FPS in Unreal Tournament.

There were other true pioneers there. Playing.

And, unknowingly, building the future.

The Hardware That Clicked

Ideas alone don’t change the world. They do so when the right conditions exist to bring them to life.

AI isn’t new. We’ve dreamed of it since the Greeks. Plato, Aristotle, myths of automatons and living statues — all were attempts to imagine intelligence without flesh and bone.

But the Greeks had no data. No sensors. No clocks. No logs. They dreamed of logical structures with no fuel to drive them.

Then came the Cartesians, the logicians, the early cyberneticists. They had more: algebra, calculators. With Leibniz, Turing, and others, the dream came closer. They had theory, electricity, algorithms.

But they still lacked the great fuel: data.

When the data finally arrived — the real, massive, messy, everyday data — what we lacked was the ability to process it. We had mountains of information, but we were digging with teaspoons that bent or broke.

Until everything aligned: models, data, and — crucially — hardware.

So, if we may be allowed to rewrite the quote we began this article with:

“There is nothing more powerful than an AI that finally got the hardware to run all that software.”

That’s what happened.

It wasn’t a miracle. It was a technical, cultural, and generational alignment.

We Are the Hinge Generation

Not because we’re better. Not because we’re unique. But because we were lucid witnesses to how a fantasy became the standard.

We were the last generation to live without the Internet — and the first to teach our parents and our kids how to use it.

We saw a nerd become a CEO. An icon. A symbol.

We programmed without knowing English. We recorded music off the radio onto cassette tapes. We understood the logic of a floppy drive, the patience of a modem, the imperfect alchemy of a poorly installed driver.

Our experience is not nostalgia — it’s invisible infrastructure. Operational memory. A useful legacy.

There are fewer and fewer of us. Not because of merit. Not because of mystique. Just math.

The ones who wrote on a ZX Spectrum in the ’80s.

The ones who hand-coded HTML pages in the ’90s.

The ones who watched thousands of dot-coms collapse in 2000 — and kept going.

The ones who, in the 2010s, talked about big data, blockchain, and machine learning over beers.

And who, in 2025… are writing prompts like this. ;)

We are not better. We are cumulative witnesses.

And that has a value no AI can generate.

Because you can’t synthesize the experience of having stayed awake through five technological eras.

The Mandate We Carry

If you saw something being born, help it grow with meaning.

AI is not just a tool. It’s also a mirror, an oracle, a doorway. It can also be a monster, a sphinx, a parable.

It’s not enough to use it. We need to understand what it says about us. How it rewrites us. What it reveals about our humanity — and what it conceals.

It’s not enough that it knows how to talk. It must also know how to stay silent. To listen. To make mistakes with dignity. Not to replace the correct with the incorrect — with a hallucination.

It’s up to us — the hinge generation — to stay alert, help where we can, point out the mistakes… Like when we told Word’s autocorrect for the thousandth time that “Beatles” was correctly spelled, and to stop suggesting “vétales.” (ok, this bit is only funny in Spanish, but you can get the idea).

We are the ones who know that technology without meaning is just a more efficient way to hollow out the soul.

And that the soul, in order to stay a soul, needs errors, ambiguity, slowness, and mystery.

It is time…

AI didn’t fall from the sky, nor was it sent from the Vega star system. We saw it born and grow with our own eyes. We were waiting for it. Maybe not this fast. Maybe not with this much hype. Maybe not with so many GPT-bros selling courses on how to sell courses on how to sell courses on how to sell courses…

But we were waiting.

And our time has come.

Not to surrender to it.

But to use it to do better things.

And to remind it — when it forgets — that we are still human.

And that, at least for now, we are still in charge.

Now then… having said all this... Shall I prepare it as a PDF, a LinkedIn post, a Medium article, or a video with voiceover and subtitles?