CONCEPT
AI's Place in History
Perez's 2024 argument that artificial intelligence belongs to the fifth ICT revolution rather than inaugurating a sixth — arriving during what should have been the deployment phase of a revolution that began in 1971.
In her March 2024 essay "What Is AI's Place in History?", Perez argued that artificial intelligence "must be understood as belonging to a larger, more mature technological revolution that began a half-century ago." AI is not the sixth revolution. It is a powerful development within the fifth — the information and communications technology revolution that irrupted with the microprocessor in 1971 and whose deployment phase has yet to fully arrive. As early as 1986, Perez had written that computers follow paths "towards increasing processing power" and other directions that "widen into the future with the target of 'artificial intelligence.'" She saw AI coming — not as a separate revolution but as the natural destination of the ICT paradigm, the place where five decades of accelerating computational power, networking, and software development were always heading.
In The You On AI Field Guide
This framing has enormous consequences for the diagnosis of the present moment. If AI is