In general terms, one is able to trace themes throughout world history. Some of them also come with catchy taglines (e.g. absolute power corrupts absolutely, innovation happens on the periphery, the dialectic of technology and the environment--thesis, antithesis, synthesis, social-Darwainism, survival of the fittest, and so on), but what they all have in common is the idea that history unfolds as a narrative that connects discrete points that can be explained using human reason. In other words, these themes serve us as a theory that is induced by observable and recorded data points. It is quite the opposite of scientific, where a hypothesis is posited and then put through the crucible of experimentation to test its validity. Those who study themes of world history look for patterns in data and then reason out narrative explanations. It is, in this sense, expository.

Being the amateur historian I am, I don't generally subscribe to any of these narratives, but I find each of them presents a rather convenient way of understanding the past. They often present fun, over-simplifications of what has happened; plus, they give us an arsenal of highfalutin-sounding terminology to talk about what has gone on in the world.

But probably the greatest value they can provide is that they open up discourse. Take for example the theme that technological innovation and the environment have a dialectic relationship (--oh, you'll have to bare with the fancy Marxist terminology, for the moment), meaning these two factors are inversely-correlated. Take any technology, for example, fossil fuel energy, and then look at how it develops in comparison to the environment around it. I'm not talking about human-caused climate change (if you buy into that), but the environment in which this technology occurs. Down the supply chain, there are obvious touchpoints where the human technological operations make a footprint on the environment. Eventually there comes a point where the environment no longer can sustain this technology or otherwise renders it less efficient or desirable, which forces innovation, and so on. Go farther back to when people burned whale-oil for light. This was a hot commodity, and was the result of the innovation of sea-faring whaling boats and all the other cool whale-hunting trappings that became easier to manufacture with industrialization--don't know what I'm talking about, just read Moby Dick (I know, a big ask). Whaling wasn't very efficient, the whales started to die off, and new forms of energy began to get unearthed.

Can see the problem with these stories? They render history in oversimplifications, necessarily, to present a narrative. Let's keep going. Darwin's thesis, that animal life evolves through a series of adaptations that happen in relation to the environment, later found analogue in Dawkins' notion of cultural evolution. Memes, Dawkins showed, are units of cultural transmission, which self-replicate and undergo the same selective-pressure as genes. Great, another narrative to go with--that is, ideas, cultural artifacts, JPEGs, or memes behave just like genes, in that humans implicitly rule some of them out through some mysterious consensus mechanism. Those preserving the life span of their hosts replicate more, where as those shortening it, die off.

What Dawkins, Darwin and even Hitler began to obsess over in their dogmas was also an historical theme--that the fittest survive--and not wholesale true. The inverse, that is, that unfit traits will not replicate, is more accurate, but is also self-evident. Further, there are examples in nature where the "flattest" survive, being 'good-enough' (e.g. many viruses) and even the semelparous, being self-destructive they are (e.g. pacific salmon).

The idea that new technologies necessarily make humanity more productive is another theme, especially in the histories of western capitalism, and like the others, is insufficient. Nowadays, this notion of the inexorability of human progress is so oft repeated, one can even call it a meme, as it is the main argument relied upon by Nvidia and now SpaceX bag holders. New technologies will never lead to increased suffering and will always increases human flourishing, prosperity, sustaining more of life itself etc., etc.. This is a great meme, even if it is misguided from the truth.

Technology makes people better at what they want to do, but can have a sterilizing effect on human ingenuity, inventiveness, and imagination. Increased industrial manufacturing under total wartime economies didn't increase human prosperity, but set it back decades in many places. After the war, in America, the increased capacity led to amazing new technologies in the household, sure, but didn't lead to many people doing new things they didn't previously do. They just did more of it faster, more laundry, more cooking, more cleaning etc.. You would hope this led to men and women spending more time with their families, but it didn't, and on net, it just freed up people, especially women, to work more. Industrial farming hasn't led to more, better food variety, but less of it, and poorer quality at that. Accelerated computing, likewise, has yet to prove itself to be the technology of our generation, and even if it ever does, it will only ever be a meme.

AI does not and will not meaningfully change humanity, because technology never really has. Meaningful application of it will be concentrated among a small minority of the population who will continue to use it to pursue their own ends (censorship of information, control of the population, economic forecasting, central planning etc.). As it advances and diffuses to the majority, it will continue to be sold and marketed for more and more meaningless applications even than we see today. Porn recommendations will be better, mind-numbing social media feeds will be more enticing, video generation will blow you away, and the amount of ways that you will be able to trick yourself into using it to waste your time will astonish; it will not increase the human imagination, human ingenuity or creativity--the true engine of human flourishing and prosperity--but only diminish it.

AI is a meme and you would do yourself a favor by not using it as much as possible, keeping your imagination active, spending time being creative, thinking deeply about things, reading books and trying to formulate your thoughts into coherent pieces of writing, as I have done here.