War, Crisis, and the Misdirection of Technological History

In The You On AI Field Guide

The dominant frames for discussing artificial intelligence in 2025–2026 are crisis frames. Existential risk: AI might destroy humanity. Job displacement: AI will eliminate millions of jobs. Civilizational transformation: AI will reorganize every institution within a generation. Arms race: the nation that leads in AI will dominate the twenty-first century. Each frame concentrates attention on the extreme scenario — the worst case, the best case, the case that produces the most dramatic narrative — and renders invisible the ordinary deployment that will affect more people than any extreme scenario.

The crisis frame is structurally distinct from the use-centered frame even when both describe the same underlying reality. The SaaSpocalypse is a crisis narrative; the underlying event is a market repricing — significant, disruptive, painful for those inside it, but not an apocalypse. The jobs discourse is a crisis frame; the underlying reality is more ambiguous — some jobs eliminated, some restructured, some new jobs created, many existing jobs intensified rather than displaced. The ambiguity is not dramatic enough for the crisis frame, which requires clarity: either catastrophe or salvation. The ambiguity is, however, the actual state of the evidence.

The existential risk discourse is the purest expression of the crisis frame. Investment in AI safety research focused primarily on existential risk scenarios has grown rapidly. Investment in understanding the mundane, everyday, already-occurring effects of AI on ordinary work, ordinary education, ordinary attention, and ordinary institutional practice has grown far more slowly. The crisis frame directs resources toward the dramatic scenario and away from the actual one. This is not a failure of intention; it is a structural feature of how crisis narratives allocate attention.

Edgerton's response is not to dismiss crisis concerns but to insist on proportionality. The crisis frame describes the experience from inside the rupture — from the perspective of people closest to the frontier, with the most at stake in the outcome. The use-centered frame describes the same transition from outside the crisis, and the view shows not a five-stage dramatic arc but a far more gradual process: slow adoption, uneven deployment, incremental adjustment, the persistence of older practices alongside newer ones, and the accumulation of small changes over decades rather than seasons.

Origin

The framework draws on Edgerton's extensive work in British military and industrial history — particularly England and the Aeroplane and Warfare State — where he documented in detail how war shapes both technology and the historical record of technology, and how crisis distortions persist in popular memory long after the original crisis has passed.

Key Ideas

Crisis frames demand drama. The genre of the crisis narrative requires turning points, phase transitions, before-and-after moments that resist the slow, ambiguous patterns of actual technological change.

Attention follows drama, not impact. The most-attended technologies are not the most-impactful; the misdirection produces investment, policy, and education distortions.

Existential risk crowds out everyday harm. The AI safety discourse focused on hypothetical futures has outcompeted attention to documented current effects.

The slow story has been right every time. Across a century of technological transitions, the use-centered analysis has consistently produced more accurate predictions than the crisis frame.