AI's Place in History

In the AI Story

This framing has enormous consequences for the diagnosis of the present moment. If AI is a new revolution, then the current frenzy is an installation phase in its early stages, the crash is years away, and the institutional response can afford to be deliberate. The turning point lies in the future. There is time. If AI is part of the ICT revolution — its most powerful expression, arriving during what should have been the deployment phase — then the situation is far more urgent and far more strange. The ICT revolution's installation phase peaked with the dot-com bubble. The turning point came with the crash of 2000 and the financial crisis of 2008. The deployment phase should have followed. It did not fully arrive.

Perez's 2019 statement captured the consequence: "I see the present as the 1930s, the turning point of the IT surge. We have had 2 frenzies and we have not yet had a golden age. The power of AI, IoT, 3D, robots, blockchain is there to be shaped." The dot-com bubble was the first frenzy. The AI investment surge is the second. And the golden age — the deployment phase, the period of broad institutional reform and distributed prosperity — remains unrealized.

The diagnosis places AI in a more precarious institutional position than the "sixth revolution" narrative suggests. AI has arrived into the institutional vacuum left by the incomplete deployment of the previous revolution — a society that went through the speculative frenzy of the dot-com era, endured the financial crises that should have been the turning point, and then failed to build the deployment-phase institutions that every previous golden age required.

Whether the framing is correct is debated. Many observers treat AI as sufficiently distinct from the preceding digital technologies to constitute a new surge. Perez's counter is that the underlying paradigm — digital information processing, networking, and computational abstraction — has been continuous from 1971 onward, and that AI is the paradigm's culminating expression rather than a fresh irruption.

Origin

Perez first articulated the AI-as-ICT-culmination thesis in technical papers in 1986 and developed it across subsequent decades, most recently in her 2024 essay and in public statements responding to the AI investment surge.

Key Ideas

Part of the fifth, not the sixth. AI belongs to the ICT revolution that began in 1971.

Second frenzy within one revolution. The dot-com bubble and the AI investment surge are both within the ICT cycle.

Institutional deficit. AI arrives into the vacuum left by the ICT's incomplete deployment.

1930s analogy. The present is structurally analogous to the 1930s — a turning point with no golden age yet realized.

There to be shaped. The technology's power is not inevitable; its direction depends on institutional choices.

Debates & Critiques

The framing is contested. Observers who treat AI as a sixth revolution argue that the paradigm shift is large enough to warrant a new classification. Perez's response is empirical: the underlying technological paradigm is continuous, and AI's arrival during the ICT's unrealized deployment phase explains the institutional strangeness of the current moment in ways the sixth-revolution framing cannot.