This is an updated version originally published in my Forbes column What if the most important thing about AI is not what it can do today, but what becomes possible because it exists? That was the question I kept coming back to after hearing Blackstone’s Jon Gray compare this moment to America in 1870. At the time, much of the country still ran on farms, horses, wood, and candlelight. Thirty years later, by 1900, steel, railroads, electricity, cities, and entirely…