CONCEPT
War, Crisis, and the Misdirection of Technological History
Edgerton's diagnosis that war and crisis distort technological history by concentrating attention on extreme applications while rendering invisible the ordinary uses that constitute the majority of any technology's actual impact.
War and crisis distort the historical record of technology in systematic ways. The atomic bomb received more intellectual attention than any technology in history; the Kalashnikov rifle killed more people; the machete killed nearly a million in the Rwandan genocide. The crisis frame directs attention toward the dramatic weapon and away from the mundane weapon, and the allocation of attention has consequences: investment in nuclear nonproliferation dwarfed investment in small-arms control, despite the fact that small arms caused more deaths by orders of magnitude. Edgerton has documented this misdirection across the entire history of military technology and extended the analysis to the AI moment, where the same dynamic is visible in the distortion of attention toward existential risk and dramatic capability claims and away from the mundane, currently occurring effects of AI deployment.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The dominant frames for discussing artificial intelligence in 2025–2026 are crisis frames.