AI and Ages of Disruption
New technologies bring with them both promise and peril. Artificial intelligence (AI) is the latest in a series of technologies that have the chance to change the course of human history. But how will historians consider AI in light of humanity’s other technological advances?
Agriculture
Historians think humans have been farming for about 11,000 years. That process began slowly. Anthropologist Dr. Jay Stock thinks that the hunter-gatherers “were starting to congregate in large numbers in specific places, build architecture, and show more-complex ritual and symbolic burial practices – signs of a greater attachment to a location and a changing pattern of social complexity that imply they were on the trajectory toward agriculture.”
According to National Geographic, there is not one agreed upon reason humans began farming. “A 2025 study suggests catastrophic wildfires and soil erosion drove the transition,” according to the National Geographic.
Geneticist Hugo Oliveira compares agriculture “to bipedalism and fire…It changed completely the way we interact with the environment, the way we interact with ourselves.”
The agricultural revolution spurred the need for greater food storage. “This would have both spurred population growth due to a more consistent food supply and required a settled way of life with the need to store seeds and tend crops,” Blakemore argues.
The Wheel
The wheel’s origins go back about 6,000 years. Some scholars believe the wheel was invented by copper miners around 3900 B.C. They posit that a square cart filled with copper would have moved across cylindrical rollers and eventually evolved to a wheel-and-axle design. Another theory suggests the first axle was found not on a cart, but on a potter’s wheel.
The wheel, like agriculture, transformed human life. Anthropologist David Anthony said, “It would be difficult to exaggerate the social and economic importance of the first wheeled transport.” Wheeled vehicles made farming more productive and efficient. Mária Bondár, from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences argues that farmers who had access to wheeled vehicles kept domesticated animals longer and trained them to pull carts. “In the wake of the training they underwent, the animals’ value increased and the range of their exploitation was broadened and significantly transformed.”
The French Museum Citéco, an institution dedicated to the economy, says that the technology developed around the wheel, “facilitated the mobility of goods and people, transforming trade, daily travel, and military strategies.”
Electricity
The technological changes brought by electricity are more recent. Many credit Benjamin Franklin as the man who ‘discovered’ electricity when in 1752 he demonstrated “the electrical nature of lightning.”
A few years later, in 1800, Italian scientist Alessandro Volta created the first battery creating a stack of “alternating zinc and silver discs, separated by brine-soaked cloth,” according to the website Advancing Physics.
By the late 1800s, Thomas Edison “began selling electricity as a commodity,” according to the BBC. However, it took several years before steam-powered industrial factories adopted it as an energy source. By the 1920s, “productivity in American manufacturing soared in a way never seen before or since,” reported the BBC.
Airplanes
Around the same time electricity became more widely available in the U.S., aviation took off. The first flight took place on December 17, 1903, in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina; the aircraft was piloted by Orville Wright, with his brother Wilbur Wright running beside him.
Just eleven years later, the first commercial flight was recorded— a short trip from St. Petersburg, Florida over to Tampa. The flight cost $5.
The Great War became the first major conflict to use airplanes, first for reconnaissance, and then as fighter planes.
Since the invention of flight, air travel has revolutionized transportation. One can travel from New York to Los Angeles in about 6 hours, and from New York to Singapore in around 19 hours.
Computers
Personal computers were born, some think with Steve Jobs’ Apple II, which was “designed for consumers, not just hobbyists or the technically skilled,” according to James W. Cortada, Senior research fellow at the University of Minnesota’s Charles Babbage Institute.
However, it was IBM, not Apple, that had initial success. In October 1981, the IBM PC was launched and generated $1 billion in revenue.
Now, around 95% of U.S. households own at least one PC.
Among the many ways computers have shaped American life, they have become indispensable in the labor market. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, “92 percent of all jobs posted in 2021 required digital skills” and “47 percent required at least one definitely digital skill.”
Internet
Of course, the ubiquity of the PC runs parallel with the emergence of the Internet. The origins of which go back to the Cold War.
According to journalist John Naughton, “Until the end of the 1970s, access to the developing Internet was restricted to those working in a relatively small number of institutions which held research contracts from ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency).”
In 1991, a programmer named Tim Berners-Lee from MIT, created the World Wide Web, which allows “easy access to information linked throughout the globe.”
The Web’s adoption was slow until a breakthrough in 1993 at the University of Illinois. There, Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina created a browser called Mosaic. According to Naughton, Mosaic’s launch “was a landmark moment in the evolution of both the Web and the Internet. It provided a dramatic illustration of the Web’s potential for both publication and commerce.”
As of 2021, about 5 billion people around the world use the Internet.
AI
The rise of artificial intelligence has dominated news headlines in the past few years and is now the subject of a new papal encyclical.
IBM writer Tim Mucci locates the pre-20th century origins of A.I. with Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, where Swift “introduces the idea of The Engine, a large mechanical contraption used to assist scholars in generating new ideas, sentences and books.”
It was not until the 1950s when AI research began. According to the Wall Street Journal, the “English mathematician Alan Turing predicted that artificial intelligence would soon emerge, supported by the new digital computers he helped invent.”
In the 1980s, University of Toronto researcher Geoffrey Hinton began working on “neural networks that process information in ways inspired by the human brain,” according to the Wall Street Journal. Those neural networks provide the “basis” for the technologies used in A.I. programs like ChatGPT.
Hinton has since been dubbed the “Godfather of AI and has warned about its dangers. The Journal reports that Hinton said, “We’re in a situation that most people can’t even conceive of, which is that these digital intelligences are going to be a lot smarter than us, and if they want to get stuff done, they’re going to want to take control.”
Pope Leo, in his first encyclical Magnifica humanitas called for a responsible governance of A.I. technology and cautioned against substituting A.I. for real human connection.