Given the extremity of our moment there is an understandable desire to look to history as a possible source of orientation: hegemonic succession, fascism, the nuclear arms race, Cold War 2.0, middle-income trap, Japan 1990s etc are all commonly invoked.
In each case the motive is understandable and the discussion is often fruitful, but more often than not the effect is comforting and to that degree also misleading.
Fascism was a political force that was defeated.
If we are in an interregnum then there is a new order to come.
The nuclear arms race was managed and the “West won the Cold War”.
If there are middle-income traps, then China’s growth must ultimately end and the “natural order” of world hierarchy will reassert itself.
To my mind each of these analogies follows a similar pattern. You start with uncertainty, reach for history and arrive at a narrative which, even if it is not fully spelled out, actually has a reassuring conclusion. The fact that the conclusion remains tacit contributes significantly to the consoling effect.
To put it the other way around, if any of this chosen repertoire of stories had truly nightmarish conclusions would we really be invoking them so light-handedly?
To avoid that vertiginous turn involves subtle shifts of focus. We speak of the threat of a new fascism not so much of the Holocaust or World War II. We speak of the Manhattan project, less of Hiroshima, Nagasaki (they barely appear in Nolan’s Oppenheimer) or even worse possibilities.
You might reply: what’s wrong with a consoling story as a rallying cry? What’s wrong with summoning allies to a battle that we might actually win? Fair enough. But there is also an evident risk: we not only underestimate the danger, but above all we underestimate the novelty, the historical novelty of the situation we are in.
What we underestimate is that we may not be in a re-run. This may not be the latest installment of a familiar franchise. We may be in a radically new script or, at the very least, in a new mash-up the likes of which we have simply never seen before.
You think you are in Alien v. Predator and then Hannibal Lecter walks in.
What film are we in now?
My latest argument along these lines was in the FT on Friday, where I argued that the current AI race is NOT, as widely suggested, a re-run of the Manhattan Project.
Why not? Because of the political economy …
What separates us both from the Manhattan Project and from Dr Strangelove is political economy. … The world we are in is not that of ascetic bombmakers wrestling with their souls. It is both darker and more mundane. Today’s world-threatening technologies are fuelled by trillionaire greed, junk bonds and jerry-rigged financial engineering.
As a colleague recently pointed out on twitter, if they had made the decision to wind down the Manhattan project, it would not have caused a massive stock market crash.
Think of my FT piece as the latest installment in a long-running series that starts with polycrisis and neoliberal order breakdown syndrome continues with
Violence and Hyper-agency.
Mar-a-Lago Stockholm syndrome.
The malign coincidence of MAGA and AI.
Trumpite futurism or taking seriously Musk’s space business.
What film are we in now?
In filmic terms (as far as AI is concerned), think Dr Strangelove mashed up with Gordon “Greed-is-Good” Gekko and a dash of The Big Short. If this is the way the world ends, it will be not with a bang or a whimper, but in a whirl of tech jargon, Californian lifestyles and financial engineering.
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I see the idea that there will be an interregnum with no new order bandied about a lot in Tooze-adjacent circles. It's nonsensical. It's the flip-side of "nothing ever happens". World systems are dynamic, they decompose, change, recompose. What happens next will emerge from what is happening now, and what is happening now may be novel, but it is explicable: that's historical materialism. Stuart Hall is extremely useful here: he calls for us to return to the “complex concrete" and build up a picture of the world from there. That's an eminently accomplishable project, albeit a difficult one. It will be accomplished by many different and mostly ordinary people doing work on the ground and coordinating together. Get out your spades.
The difference between then, the Manhattan Project, and now, for AI, is context. Then, there were defined enemies in an active war. There was a defined goal, to bring those enemies to their knees. To many, this is objectionable, but those were the times. True, for both the Manhattan Project and AI, the technologies were and are being developed on the fly, and true for both, the local risks of those projects to workers and to the world at large were and remain unknown. The key difference with AI now is that we have no imperative to rush into the allowance of AI to have free rein in society. One theory in favor of the bomb was to stop a war and omit the necessity for an invasion of the Japanese home islands, with a projected loss of more than 1 million soldiers. To not have AI tomorrow will not be a loss to people. There is no serious penalty with delay and careful guardrails. In fact, there is only high risk with rapid deployment.