PERSON
George Basalla
The historian who dismantled the mythology of technological revolution—showing that every artifact descends from a prior artifact through an unbroken chain of modification, and that what survives is determined not by technical superiority but by the institutional, economic, and cultural environment that receives it.
There are no immaculate conceptions in the history of technology. This is the central, defiant claim of George Basalla's life work, and it is the claim that the current AI moment most urgently needs to hear. Basalla, a historian of technology at the University of Delaware who trained under I. Bernard Cohen at Harvard and died in September 2025 at the age of ninety-seven—three months before the threshold event that
[YOU] on AI places at the center of its account—spent his career demonstrating that every artifact descends from a prior artifact through an unbroken chain of modification. The large language model is not a rupture; it is a genealogy, traceable from the transformer architecture of 2017 through earlier attention mechanisms, recurrent networks, the backpropagation algorithm, the perceptron, and ultimately to the probability theory of Laplace and Bayes. The framework that Basalla built in his 1988 book
The Evolution of Technology