Member-only story
What Will AI Do to Democracy?
We’re not that good at predicting the cultural effects of technology
In 1858, authors Charles Briggs and Augustus Maverick trumpeted the promise of the telegraph, then the hottest new technology on the planet. They wrote that
Of all the marvelous achievements of modern science the electric telegraph is transcendentally the greatest and most serviceable to mankind … The whole earth will be belted with the electric current, palpitating with human thoughts and emotions … How potent a power, then, is the telegraphic destined to become in the civilization of the world! This binds together by a vital cord all the nations of the earth. It is impossible that old prejudices and hostilities should longer exist, while such an instrument has been created for an exchange of thought between all the nations of the earth.
Three decades later, the AT&T engineer John J. Carty predicted something similar about the telephone:
Someday we will build up a world telephone system, making necessary to all peoples the use of a common language or common understanding of languages, which will join all the people of the earth into one brotherhood. There will be heard throughout the earth a great voice coming out of the ether which will proclaim, ‘Peace on earth, good will towards men.’
