PERSON

David Edgerton

The British historian of technology who spent his career proving that the most important tools are almost never the newest ones—and whose use-centered framework now stands as the clearest corrective to the innovation illusions surrounding artificial intelligence.

David Edgerton is the historian who tells you to look away from the frontier. When he addressed the United Kingdom's House of Lords Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence in 2017 and called the prevailing rhetoric “ahistorical, crude nonsense,” he was not dismissing AI's capabilities. He was naming a structural error in how societies think about technology—an error so deeply embedded that pointing it out has roughly the same effect as pointing out the existence of water to a fish. The error is this: we tell the history of technology as a history of invention, celebrating each new breakthrough as a rupture that reorganizes civilization, while remaining blind to the vast, unglamorous landscape of use—the actual tools that most people use most of the time, which are almost never the ones anyone is currently celebrating. Edgerton's career at King's College London, spanning his landmark works The Shock of the Old and The Warfare State, built the alternative framework:

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