Glossary / Second watershed

Second watershed

The book's term for how AI reshapes both sides of the hardware equation: compressing development before launch and compounding capability after it.

Introduced in Chapter 24 — The Second Watershed of Tangibles.

Related terms

• Right to repair — The principle, increasingly written into law, that owners should be able to fix what they bought — a counter-pressure to closed, unrepairable hardware.
• Sense-Decide-Act loop — The progression from sensing (monitoring) to adding a decision layer (analysis) to adding actuation (control) — the spine of what a connected device does with data.
• Recurring revenue — Income that repeats — subscriptions, services, consumables — rather than a one-time sale.
• Sensor fusion — Combining inputs from multiple sensors — motion, biometric, vision — into a richer signal than any one sensor provides; the highest level of the interface stack.