Global Security, Privacy, & Risk Management

Technology Anxiety Is 2,400 Years Old. AI Is Just the Latest Target. May 19, 2026

A friend recently showed me a Facebook post arguing that AI was invented by the devil and will destroy the world. He was half-laughing, half-baffled. Welcome to the oldest pattern in technology discourse. I had to write about this….

Around 370 BCE, in his dialogue Phaedrus, Plato has Socrates tell a story about the Egyptian god Theuth, who presented the gift of writing to King Thamus. Theuth pitched it as “an elixir of memory and wisdom.” Thamus wasn’t impressed. Writing, he warned, would “produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory.” Worse, students would appear to know much when for the most part they knew nothing, having acquired the appearance of wisdom instead of wisdom itself. History of InformationLitCharts

The irony is foundational: we only know Socrates’ critique of writing because Plato wrote it down. The technology he feared became the technology that preserved his fear of it. Every generation since has performed some version of this same move.

In 1545, the Swiss scholar Conrad Gessner compiled the Bibliotheca Universalis, an attempt to catalog every printed book in Europe. In the preface, he complained about the “confusing and harmful abundance of books” unleashed by Gutenberg’s printing press. The same printing revolution that gave us mass literacy, modern science, and the spread of medical knowledge was, to a serious scholar of the day, an overwhelming threat to the mind. Blogger

In the 1700s, the French statesman Malesherbes argued that newspapers were socially isolating readers and detracted from the spiritually uplifting group practice of getting news from the pulpit. People used to gather to learn the news together. Now they read it alone. He saw this as the decay of civic life. Slate

In 1881, American neurologist George M. Beard published American Nervousness, in which he identified the telegraph as a primary cause of a new disease he called “neurasthenia.” “Before Morse, merchants worried much less,” he wrote. Now stock prices and disasters from distant cities arrived instantly, overwhelming the nervous system. The telegraph, in his diagnosis, was making Americans literally sick. News Directory 3

In 1883, the medical journal The Sanitarian warned that schools “exhaust the children’s brains and nervous systems with complex and multiple studies, and ruin their bodies by protracted imprisonment.” Universal literacy — the thing Socrates feared, that Gessner feared, that we now consider the baseline of civilization — was, when actually implemented, considered a leading cause of madness. Slate

In 2008, journalist Nicholas Carr published Is Google Making Us Stupid? in The Atlantic, arguing that the internet was eroding our capacity for deep reading and sustained attention.

Now it’s AI. The current generation of anxiety has its target. Within ten years it will be something else.

The pattern is not subtle. Every transformative technology produces a class of people who immediately predict it will destroy something essential — memory, attention, sociality, reason, the soul. They are sometimes partially right; the technology does change behavior in ways the previous order finds disorienting. They are mostly wrong in scale and direction; the apocalypse never arrives, the new technology becomes the new baseline, and the same cognitive machinery rotates to the next target.

This does not mean every concern about technology is hysteria. Some are legitimate. Real critiques of AI — about labor displacement, about concentrated corporate power, about fabrication in consequential domains — deserve serious engagement. The point is to distinguish substantive analysis from reflexive anxiety dressed in metaphysical language. “AI is the devil” is not analysis. It is the same response Thamus had to writing, in updated vocabulary.

Three useful questions when someone makes a sweeping claim that a new technology will destroy us:

First, does the same person rely on previous technologies that earlier generations also predicted would destroy us? Books, newspapers, electricity, telephones, television, computers, the internet, smartphones, GPS, online banking. The same person typing “AI will destroy us” into Facebook is using a global network of data centers, recommendation algorithms, and personal devices that consume vastly more energy than the AI training they are objecting to. If the position is really about energy, attention, or autonomy, the existing technologies should be at least as alarming as the new ones. They are not, because the position is not really about those things. It is about novelty.

Second, is the prediction specific and falsifiable, or is it metaphysical? “AI will produce confidently fabricated outputs that cause measurable harm in quantitative work” is a specific, testable claim that I have written about elsewhere. “AI is from the devil” is not. The first earns a serious response. The second is a costume worn by an emotion.

Third, who benefits from the apocalyptic framing? Apocalyptic predictions sell better than measured ones. They get clicks, fund careers, build movements. That does not automatically make them wrong, but it should adjust the weight given to them — particularly when the predictor has no operational experience with the technology they are predicting will end civilization.

Socrates was a brilliant man. He was also wrong about writing. The civilization that emerged on the foundation of literacy — including the preservation of his own thought — is the rebuttal. He had no way to see that, because he was inside the moment of transition, where the costs of the new technology were visible and the benefits were not yet imaginable.

We are inside that same moment with AI. Some of the costs are visible. Some are real. The benefits — for those who learn to use the tool well, and not as a substitute for thinking — are still mostly latent, surfacing in ones and twos as practitioners figure out how to operate the new instrument.

The question is not whether the new technology will change us. It will. Every transformative technology does. The question is whether we will be Thamus, warning everyone that the children will forget how to remember, or whether we will be the ones who learn to use the new tool well enough that the next generation takes it for granted — and then panics about whatever comes after.