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Is AI a Steam Engine or a Calculator?
How historical analogies shape our understanding of the AI revolution
We humans love to mine the past to give context to new circumstances and events. We compare our current economic troubles to historic recessions and depressions and describe modern authoritarians in light of Julius Caesar or Benito Mussolini. In many ways, it’s a natural thing to do. Our brains, when they encounter something new, try to place it in the context of what we already know. So, when something new comes along, we want to say, “This new thing is like that old thing I already understand!”
In some ways, this isn’t surprising. Our brains are lazy, and, rather than coming up with an entirely new understanding of the world, they prefer to map new information about a phenomenon like artificial intelligence onto an old template. Essentially, we’ve trained our minds on a great deal of information from our schooling and life experience. They work as prediction engines, using that data to make sense of what’s coming.
In other words, we behave kind of like large language models.
The problem with this tendency in our thinking is that new events don’t exactly conform to the way things have worked in the past. This means that the historical analogies on which we choose to base our understanding…
