Historicism

In the AI Story

The AI moment has revived a historicist framing through metaphors of inevitability. Edo Segal's river-of-intelligence metaphor — intelligence flowing through progressively complex channels from hydrogen atoms through biological evolution to large language models — captures something true about the past. Read carefully, it does not claim inevitability. Read carelessly, it implies a direction: the channels have widened for 13.8 billion years; they will continue to widen; resistance is futile; the task is to redirect the flow, not to question whether the flow should continue.

Popper would insist on the distinction between a trend and a law. A trend is a pattern that has held in the past. A law is a pattern that must hold in the future. The history of intelligence is a trend — traceable retrospectively. The fact that intelligence has flowed through widening channels does not entail that it will continue to do so. The trend can be disrupted, reversed, or transformed by choices, inventions, and catastrophes no extrapolation from the past can predict.

This is not pedantic. It is the distinction on which human agency in the AI moment depends. If the widening is a law, agency reduces to how we adapt to what is coming. The range of permissible responses narrows to the pragmatic. If the widening is a trend, agency operates differently: the question is not merely how to manage the transformation but whether to pursue it, in what form, at what pace, toward what ends, with what constraints.

Kevin Kelly's concept of the technium — technology making itself through us — is the purest expression of historicist framing. Popper would reject it categorically. Technology does not have tendencies. People have tendencies. Institutions have incentives. The direction of technological development is the result of choices that could have been made differently. The language of inevitability converts decisions into events and agents into bystanders.

Origin

Popper's critique of historicism began in essays written in the 1930s, first published as a book in 1957 as The Poverty of Historicism. He developed the argument further in The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), which treated Plato, Hegel, and Marx as the historicist tradition's major architects. The critique shaped postwar Anglo-American political philosophy and remains the standard reference for arguments against deterministic theories of history.

Key Ideas

Knowledge unpredictability. Because future knowledge is inherently unpredictable, and knowledge shapes history, the future course of history cannot be predicted.

Trend vs. law. Patterns that have held in the past (trends) are not the same as patterns that must hold in the future (laws).

Agency as hostage. Historicist framing reduces human agency to adaptation, concealing the choices that actually determine outcomes.

Political danger. Historicism is not just wrong but dangerous — it provides intellectual cover for totalitarian demands to accelerate toward the inevitable.

AI application. The river metaphor, if read as historicist, absolves those driving AI deployment of responsibility by framing their choices as natural forces.

Debates & Critiques

Defenders of historicist thinking — particularly Marxist scholars — have argued that Popper misread both Marx and Hegel, reducing nuanced views about historical tendencies into caricatures of deterministic prediction. The philosophical substance of Popper's critique is largely intact regardless: even if the classical historicists were more cautious than Popper made them out to be, the argument against prediction from historical laws stands. The contemporary application to technology requires similar care. Most careful AI theorists do not claim strict inevitability. But the rhetorical effect of river-of-intelligence framing can produce the historicist disposition even where strict historicist doctrine is disclaimed.