Is the AI “Revolution” the Latest Example of Technological Change Driving History?

Warnings about the direction of “artificial intelligence” technologies come chiefly from either specialists in assessing risks and rewards of emerging technologies, or from the scientists, engineers, and corporate executives who build, test, and sell AI systems. These camps share a common aim: to captivate public imagination and galvanize support for broad acceptance of AI, while at the same time promoting responsible “guardrails” and greater transparency about possible unintended consequences. These expressions of concern about an emerging technology follow an established historical patternâ”a pattern dramatically established more than 85 years ago with a letter sent by Albert Einstein to then President Franklin D. Roosevelt about the feasibility of an atomic bomb. This essay explores how this and similar warnings in subsequent years, while well-intended, reinforce the belief in the inevitability of concrete technological changes and create a preference for adaptation over resistance. Conditional acceptance of totalizing technological systems drowns out voices that favor a pause, or delay, in adoption and thus allows time and space to socially construct alternative engineering approaches that might ultimately achieve roughly similar outcomes without the same degree of social and economic disruption. The author highlights the gap between mass perceptions of AI as deterministic and inevitable with scholarly frameworks that emphasize the plasticity of emerging technologies and their shaping by society.