AI and the Pace of Change Scambling Your Brain? Wimp!

Be glad you weren't around in the early 1800s

In 1997, a lot of us felt like the world was changing at a velocity humans had never experienced. The internet was the main driver. It exploded into our lives after the release of the Mosaic browser in October 1994. Within a couple of years, the dot-com boom shattered business models and allowed us to think of new ways to do almost everything.

Compared to today, though, the pace of change in the 1990s seems like it was as slow as the comedy on “The Carol Burnett Show.” (If you haven’t watched lately, give it a try – you’ll see what I mean.) AI is upending everything. Famed Economist Tyler Cowan even co-wrote an article titled, “AI Will Change What It Is To Be Human. Are We Ready?” Sounds scary!

Well, allow me to offer a different perspective.

In 1996, Stephen Ambrose published his bestselling book Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West. It is a detailed and gripping account of the Lewis and Clark expedition across the unmapped Western U.S. I read it soon after it first came out, and was totally fascinated.

The book made me wonder – amid the dot-com boom – what Ambrose would think of technological change and the human experience. So I called him. (As a journalist writing for USA Today, then the largest circulation newspaper in the U.S., you get to do such things.)

“Which half century experienced the most technological change since the beginning of time?” Ambrose said over the (land-line!) phone, repeating the question I’d asked him.

His answer surprised me: Nothing compares to the early 19th century – which was the time of Lewis and Clark, who set out from near what is now St. Louis in May 1804.

Ambrose referred me to a passage in Undaunted Courage:

Since the birth of civilization, there had been almost no changes in commerce or transportation. Technology was barely advanced over that of the Greeks. The Americans of 1801 had more gadgets, better weapons, a superior knowledge of geography and other advantages over the ancients, but they could not move goods or themselves or information by land or water any faster than had the Greeks and Romans.

As I wrote in my subsequent article about the experience of living in 1800: “Nothing could move faster than a horse. As far as people then knew, nothing ever would move faster than a horse.”

Ambrose in the book also quotes Henry Adams, who wrote in the late-1800s about conditions in Jefferson’s era: “Experience forced on men's minds the conviction that what had ever been must ever be.”

Ambrose told me: “At the beginning of the 19th century, people thought nothing was possible. By the end of the century, people thought anything was possible.”

By the mid-1800s, railroads criss-crossed the nation, carrying people and goods at 25 miles per hour. (Over long distances, a horse with a rider could at best go about 25 miles per DAY.) The telegraph, first used in 1844, moved information instantly. By late in that century, electricity powered streetcars and factories. Electric lights turned night into day.

Sure, the actual pace of change is greater right now than ever. But the nearly-unfathomable difference is that we have all lived our lives expecting change. The experience of everyone today is that technology advances and new inventions are constantly coming into our lives. Rapid change might be hard to keep up with, but it’s not alien to us.

So imagine when, generation after generation, there was little conception of progress. People learned their jobs from their parents who learned from their grandparents, and nobody expected to do those jobs differently. They had no reason to anticipate technological change. Doing so then would be like us today expecting time travel to be something we’d soon be able to book on Expedia.

We of the AI era are not as uniquely challenged as we might want to believe.

While I had Ambrose on the phone, I asked why he thought Undaunted Courage got so much attention. It sold far better than any of his other books at that point. Disney, Robert Redford and Ted Turner all called him about turning the book into a movie. (Never happened.)

“One reason, I think, is that it’s almost like science-fiction in reverse,” he told me.

When going 12 miles in a day was good. When it was a feat to tell time while traveling. When it was common for a mother to go a year without knowing any information about her son living a couple of states away. To us, understanding just how that worked is exotic.

Ambrose told me he wished he’d realized that when he wrote the book. “I’d have put more of it in there.”

Ambrose died in 2002 at 66, from lung cancer. I spoke to him only that one time.

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Here is the column as it appeared in the Reno Gazette-Journal on Feb 3, 1997. It was distributed through Gannett News Service so ran in many papers across the U.S.