How AI Fits Into Humanity’s Troubling History

How AI Fits Into Humanity's Troubling History

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Analysis: How AI Fits Into Humanity’s Troubling History

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Analysis

How AI Fits Into Humanity’s Troubling History

Like nuclear weapons, AI was born of human ingenuity. But its challenges are unique.

!Howard French

*Howard French*

*Howard W. French*

By **Howard W. French**, a columnist at *Foreign Policy*.

!A black and white photograph shows three men working in the control center of the the first power unit in a Soviet atom station.

*A black and white photograph shows three men working in the control center of the the first power unit in a Soviet atom station.*

A view of the control center of the first power unit in an atom station in the Soviet Union on Dec. 23, 1970. Express/Archive Photos/Getty Images

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September 22, 2026, 2:46 PM

For anyone who has been paying attention to the news for the last week or so, with its saturated coverage of the dystopian powers of artificial intelligence, it would be easy to succumb to the conclusion that we are all doomed.

Despite the fact that the coverage has been more heat than light, this take might actually be right. But that is not necessarily because AI will end up wiping out our species. Rather, it is because of something deeper and far more impervious to regulation: human nature itself.

For anyone who has been paying attention to the news for the last week or so, with its saturated coverage of the dystopian powers of artificial intelligence, it would be easy to succumb to the conclusion that we are all doomed.

Despite the fact that the coverage has been more heat than light, this take might actually be right. But that is not necessarily because AI will end up wiping out our species. Rather, it is because of something deeper and far more impervious to regulation: human nature itself.

For years, I have taught courses in public policy in both the United States and China that explore the dark unexpected consequences of human ingenuity, and the pattern is clear. Many of our most consequential breakthroughs—meaning the things that help sustain notions of human progress—bring about vastly more complicated challenges in their wake.

To help establish this picture, I often go back to the dawn of human society, when small bands of roving hunter-gatherers made the conceptual breakthrough that life might be less “nasty, brutish, and short,” to use Thomas Hobbes’s famous formula, if they instead selected good locations to settle down. The first of these are often thought to have been in the Tigris and Euphrates valley, as well as other river deltas, where predictable seasonal flooding and silt-laden soils favored the emergence of agriculture.

Undoubtedly, this achievement was one of the greatest milestones in the human story. Over time, the food supply became more regular; surpluses were produced, priming an explosion in trade; and writing and record-keeping emerged, going hand in hand with the emergence of the first states. It was not long, though, before these seeming advancements wrought annihilation. As the late political scientist James Scott and many others have noted, entire early city-states were wiped out by the very fruits of this “progress.”

As humans began living in dense communities, devastating outbreaks of infectious diseases became common, leading to mass death and the abandonment of urban clusters. The dense plantation of monocrops, which had made city life and its new prosperity possible, soon invited plagues of pests or pathogens that wiped out a year’s harvest in a blink, casting populations into starvation. And while the phenomenon of annual floods fed scientific curiosity, along with mathematics and calendars, human predictions were far from perfect, meaning that once in a generation or more, deadly floods carried everything away in their wake. As rough as their lives had been, members of the slowly dwindling roving bands had faced none of this.

In a classroom, one might trace the history of the perils of human ingenuity methodically, age by age. For our purposes, it is better to jump forward, where examples from the near present lend strength to this model.

Human development has always been constrained by the limits of available and easy-to-exploit energy. This is the problem behind the invention of the wheel, the harnessing of horses and livestock, and sea travel by sail. The exploitation of coal, and then the invention of the internal combustion engine running on seemingly inexhaustible petroleum, led to transformations scarcely less dramatic than the invention of agriculture. Only very belatedly did humans discover the perilous downsides to this revolution—catastrophic global warming—so much so that some are still in denial of it.

Another crisis born of invention related to energy flowed from the harnessing of the atom due to rapid advances in physics in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Readers may already suspect where I am going with this. With breathtaking speed, human brilliance created the means for a planetary cataclysm through nuclear war. Most baby boomers can recall growing up when this was a daily, active worry in life, and schools and government office buildings bore atomic symbols identifying them as bomb shelters.

AI is of a piece with this pattern and yet also qualitatively different. Neither global warming nor the potential dangers of nuclear weapons have been remotely solved