The congressional hearing on artificial intelligence looked exactly like every congressional hearing on technology since the internet arrived. Senators who couldn't reliably operate their own email accounts grilled engineers about a technology they understood even less. Everyone performed urgency. Nobody mentioned history.
There's a reason for that. We stopped teaching it.
What's happening right now is not new. It is not unprecedented. It is not a rupture in the fabric of human experience. It is the fourth or fifth time in five hundred years that a communications and production technology arrived faster than the institutions built to manage the previous one, and the people in charge of those institutions responded by doing exactly what they always do: claiming the new thing was different this time, trying to control access to it, and failing.
Start with Gutenberg.
The printing press arrived in Europe around 1440 and immediately became a political problem. The Church had held a near-monopoly on information reproduction for centuries. Every manuscript passed through their scriptoriums, copied by their monks, distributed through their networks. Their authority over what people read was inseparable from their authority over what people believed. The press threatened both. They fought it. They issued prohibitions, burned books, and tried to license printers. They lost anyway, not because they were weak but because the technology was decentralized by design. A press could be built anywhere. A pamphlet could be printed overnight. The Reformation moved at the speed of movable type.
The people who figured out the press fastest didn't wait for permission. They printed.
Five hundred and eighty-six years later, on May 25, 2026, Pope Leo XIV released Magnifica Humanitas, a 42,300-word encyclical calling for the "disarming" of artificial intelligence and warning of "new forms of slavery" tied to its rise. He is careful to note that technology is not, in itself, antagonistic to humanity. He simply wants it directed toward human-centered values rather than profit or concentrated control.
The Church issued prohibitions against unlicensed printing in the 1480s. That effort lasted roughly three decades before distribution networks made enforcement impossible. The institutional playbook for managing a disruptive information technology hasn't changed in six centuries. Only the word count has grown.
The Industrial Revolution is a more complicated story, and the easy version of it is wrong. The Luddites are remembered as buffoons who smashed machines because they were afraid of progress. That's not what happened. They were skilled textile workers who had spent careers developing a craft, hand-weaving at a level of quality machine production couldn't match, and they watched that skill be systematically devalued by factory owners who controlled the machines and the capital to build them. Their read of their immediate situation was correct. The disruption was real and the short-term human cost was severe. "The long arc bent toward prosperity" is accurate and useless if you're a hand-loom weaver in 1813 trying to feed a family.
What actually separated the people who navigated the industrial transition from the ones it destroyed was positioning. Not optimism. Not a growth mindset. Positioning. They figured out where they could place themselves in the new structure before someone else placed them somewhere, and they moved.
I watched a version of this happen in real time, from inside a profession it restructured overnight.
I was a green art director when desktop publishing arrived, still learning the physical craft from the people whose jobs it was about to eliminate. Before Quark XPress, before PageMaker, before the Mac became a production tool, print design had a physical vocabulary. You hand-kerned type. You built mechanicals. You worked alongside paste-up artists and typesetters and stat cameras. A designer developed feel for the work over years, the same way a craftsman develops feel for wood or metal.
Then the software arrived. A designer with a Mac could produce in an afternoon what used to require a week of shop time and three departments. Job categories disappeared. Production houses closed. Typesetters who had spent decades at their craft found that the market for it had been eliminated.
The people in my world who treated this as a threat spent years being angry about it and left the industry diminished. The people, like me, who sat down and learned the software found that it had handed them something better: direct creative control they had never had before. The gatekeeping layer between the idea and the finished product was gone. That was a freedom. I used it.
The technology didn't change what good work was. It changed who could make it and how fast.
Alvin Toffler described all of this in 1980 in The Third Wave, and before that in Future Shock in 1970. The agricultural wave. The industrial wave. The information wave. Each transition brutal in its speed and social disruption. Each one arriving faster than the last. Each one producing two populations: the people who rode the wave and the people who got tumbled by it. The framework has been in print for 46 years. Nobody in the congressional hearing mentioned it, because the people running that hearing have never read it, and the people who should have assigned it to them were busy removing history from the curriculum.
Here is where the freedom argument enters, and I'm not going to soften it.
Every technological wave creates a power question. Who controls the technology? Who decides what it's for? Gutenberg destabilized the Church's information monopoly. The industrial economy concentrated power in the owners of physical capital until labor movements negotiated their share. Desktop publishing removed an entire gatekeeping layer from creative production. AI represents something similar, and the people who currently control access to it are working hard to position themselves as its interpreters.
Big Tech wants to be the Church with the printing press. They want to decide what the technology means, what it's permitted to do, who gets to use it for what. Watch the regulatory proposals carefully. Some of them are genuine safety concerns. Others are moats. The difference matters. The same federal agencies that coordinated with social media platforms to flag and suppress content — a practice now documented in congressional testimony — are the ones writing the AI governance frameworks.
The freedom available to anyone who engages seriously with this technology is real. I use it every day. It has made me more productive, more capable, and more competitive as a solo operator than I would be with a full staff. That's not meant to be an advertisement. It's what happened.
But freedom requires critical thinking, and this is where the danger becomes concrete. The printing press democratized information and simultaneously created the first large-scale propaganda infrastructure. Both things happened with the same technology at the same time. The difference between a citizen who used the press to read the Reformation's arguments and form an opinion, and one who got handed a pamphlet by a demagogue and believed it uncritically, was not access. It was the capacity to think.
We've spent thirty years producing graduates who can't read at grade level. Those graduates are now the citizens trying to navigate an AI wave, with no historical reference points and no tools for critical evaluation. The people who will manipulate them already know this. The technology to do it is already deployed.
That's the real danger. Not the technology. The vacancy it finds when it arrives.
Don't wait for permission to engage with it. That's the lesson from every wave. The scribes who adapted did it before anyone told them it was acceptable. The textile workers who navigated the industrial transition moved before a government program was designed to help them. The designers who sat down with Quark found something better on the other side of the learning curve.
The technology is in your hands. That's the point. And that's been the point every time.
What you do with it is still yours to decide. Don't. Wait. For. Permission.
