Stop whatever you’re doing, block out all earthly distractions, suspend all your obligations, ignore all your needs and urges, and now … think. What does the term “hinge of history” mean to you?
Here’s what it means to me: a moment — or even a period or age — when civilization could have gone in one direction or another with starkly different outcomes (read: futures), and because of which civilization progressed the way it did.
No small matter.
I have been searching for the most adequate and appropriate way to convey the impact, the weight and the certain historical imprint of artificial intelligence. That’s what AI indubitably is: a hinge of history, nothing less.
To lend as much gravitas as possible to this point, permit me to tell you when and how the expression made its way to my consciousness and sensibility: Thomas Cahill.
Cahill (1940-2022) was a historian, scholar and storyteller extraordinaire who, among other books in his lifetime, wrote a series of books which he designated the “Hinges of History Series.” To bring home the point that he was neither flippant nor hyperbolic, here are those titles: “How the Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland’s Heroic Role From the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe”; “The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels”; “Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus”; “Sailing the Wine- Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter”; “Mysteries of the Middle Ages: The Rise of Feminism, Science and Art from the Cults of Catholic Europe”; and “Heretics and Heroes: How Renaissance Artists and Reformation Priests Created Our World.”
See? No small matter.
Cahill began the series in 1995, got as far as the above by 2013, veered off to other endeavors, and who knows about what other hinges of history he was planning to write? Industrialization? The internet? Social media? My bet would have been on AI—had he kept going.
Why have I, in nearly 40 essays on AI to date, deemed it worthy of the term, hinge of history? Because it is. But let me defend that position.
Understanding Thomas Kuhn’s observation that intellectual progress is not steady and gradual but marked by sudden paradigm shifts, we can take a clear look not only at things we call progress, but the choices we make with them.
The truth is that with every civilization changing invention or discovery, we humans have figured out the positive, constructive way to use them and, unfortunately, the negative, destructive way to use them. Every single one without exception. You can bet on it. Want to see if that claim holds water? Think of stone tools that became weapons, controlled use of fire that not only warmed and cooked but burned, agriculture that grew healthy foods and addictive plants, alphabets that kept history and spread lies, flight that took humans off the ground but raised war to new levels. And so on.
One more time: No small matter. But here’s the thing. AI represents the greatest transformation in human history, with the greatest potential upside and the greatest potential for disaster — up to and including the eradication of civilization as we know it — that ever occurred.
AI isn’t exactly new. Alan Turing pioneered it in the 1940s and algorithms are much older than that, but now we have other technologies that enable us to use it like never before. And the added problem is that we seem to be sliding down the slippery slope of bad decisions again (that didn’t take long). Witness the nascent case of the New York Times suing Microsoft and OpenAI in what seems like a doozy of a copyright infringement issue. And a mammoth one. I’ll not offer my opinion other than to say there’s plenty wrong in there somewhere, and we (humanity) did not put ethics controls in place before going nuts with our new plaything.
It is not possible to overstate both the upside and downside of AI. The choice — a very heavy one — is ours. And there will be no turning back.
No small matter.
Eli Amdur has been providing individualized career and executive coaching as well as corporate leadership advice since 1997. For 15 years he taught graduate leadership courses at FDU. He has been a regular writer for this and other publications since 2003. You can reach him at [email protected] or (201) 357-5844.
