Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

Paleontologists disagree about whether dinosaurs were thriving or had already entered a long decline when an extinction event finished them off sixty-six million years ago. Depending on who is right, the asteroid that struck Earth either radically changed the direction of evolution or merely accelerated an established trend. Disasters that target the currently dominant species invite similarly divergent interpretations. Their capacity to jolt us out of our complacency is not in doubt. But in so doing, do they truly redirect the course of human history, or do they merely act as catalysts of ongoing change? Covid19 is just the latest in a long series of crises that have raised this perennial question. And how it has been raised! Since the pandemic began, journalists, pundits, scholars, and pundit-scholars speak as if the pandemic will itself periodize history, into the “Before Time” and the new world that we have entered. They have fallen over each other predicting all manner of dramatic change. But what kind of change, exactly? A big divide separates the realists and the continuationists from the aspirationists and the disruptionists. The former prefer to view the coronavirus crisis as an amplifier of present shifts and enhancer of familiar structures. The latter consider it a transformative force, a crisis that is an opportunity, a source of novel remedies for assorted societal ills thought to be in urgent need of correction.  The continuationist position has much to commend it. After all, a great many of the crises highlighted by the pandemic were already underway. Nationalism and anti-glo-balist sentiment were on the rise. International indices of freedom were declining. Digital tracking and surveillance had become ever more invasive. Economic inequality was already unprecedented. Corporate debt had already reached record highs, and central banks had already begun to drive more of the economy. Tensions between the United States and China were already mounting. Iran had long been in trouble. China’s strategic ambitions were already obvious, and its growth had already begun to slow, as had India’s. Oil prices were already too low to sustain the bloated budgets of the petrostates. The European establishment was already eager to go green even before the EU’s covid-recovery package unleashed a torrent of funding for salient projects. Online shopping had long been eating into retail’s market share, and remote instruction and telecommuting had been expanding for many years. Millen-nials had already been dealt lousy cards by the Great Recession and austerity. African-Americans led shorter and unhealthier lives even before they succumbed in disproportionate numbers to the coronavirus. And even the “novel corona-virus” is not as novel as it has been made to sound: multiple outbreaks of SARS and MERS have been recorded since 2002. In all these and many other respects, the crisis has served as an accelerator and an amplifier. Sometimes the push was felt to be sudden and hard: the head-over-heels transition to remote work and teaching is a prime example. But even that apparent rupture was firmly rooted in technological shifts that had long prepared the ground. This kind of historical acceleration has a long pedigree. The World Wars and the Great Depres-sion spawned unprecedented mass mobilization (for war and revolution) and economic shocks. Taxes soared, the right to vote spread, colonial empires trembled, and welfare states bloomed. Capitalism was temporarily tamed, suspended, and sometimes even abolished. Yet none of this came out of nowhere: well before 1914, there had already been pensions, progressive taxation, labor unions, public schools, suffragists and suffragettes, and independence movements. What these crises did was give an enormous boost to initiatives that were already in progress. The dramatic empowerment of the masses was rooted in the modernizing institutional and economic transformations of the previous century or two. Even purposely radical communist regimes built on nineteenth-century ideas and embraced generic schemes such as industrialization. Genuine detours from the modernizing script — such as the Khmer Rouge’s murderous evacuations of urban residents to the countryside — remained exceedingly rare and unsuccessful outliers. Nor had historical pandemics been genuine game-changers. It is hard to imagine disasters more disruptive than the Black Death of the late Middle Ages and the pandemics of smallpox, measles and influenza that ravaged the Americas after European colonizers introduced these pathogens after 1492. Yet even the medieval plague frequently intensified earlier trends, from urbanization and the erosion of serfdom to challenges to Catholic unity and papal supremacy. In the New World, the decimation of the indigenous population greatly assisted the Spanish conquests, but even that process was ultimately a mere acceleration, however monstrous in scale and style. The ultimate outcome had hardly been in doubt: witness the wide and rapidly expanding disparities between the fiscal-military states of Europe and the largely Copper Age societies of the Americas, the fissions that had already opened within the most powerful American empires of the day, and the conquistadors’ zeal to out-colonize their fellow European competitors. Nothing quite as dramatic has happened since, even as epidemics remained common. When bubonic plague intensified one more time in seventeenth-century Europe, the most dynamic economies — most notably Britain and the Nether-lands — weathered it quite well. In the nineteenth century, massive outbreaks of cholera and yellow fever famously raised support for ambitious public health measures but cannot rightly be viewed as their root cause. After all, the counter-factual of ever richer and more knowledgeable societies persistently failing to invest in sanitation is hardly a plausible one. However much repeated health scares shaped the pace and scale of intervention, it was economic growth and science that made it possible in the first place. A century ago, the Spanish Flu was as global in its reach as Covid19 is today, but it turned out to be much more lethal. It targeted not only the elderly but also infants and, most crucially, people in their twenties and thirties — workers in the prime of life who often had just started a family and who left behind spouses and small children. Vast numbers of people died: perhaps forty