Humanity’s development of artificial intelligence has brought it to an event horizon, beyond which the future is impossible to predict based on anything that has happened in the past.

Hegel tells us that history is “cunning,” its deep designs achieved through the selfish shiftings of unknowing mortals. Of course, Hegel wasn’t one bit fooled as to history’s true intentions. Nor were his acolytes left and right, even if their epiphanies differed radically from that of the master. Everyone else, lost on the darkling plane, would, however, go nowhere worth going without guidance from these illuminati. 

There has never been a more destructive conceit than the prophetic understanding of history. Never one more costly in blood and treasure. Its roots lie in millennial religion, now secularized. Though it has hardly run its course, the world’s cocksure still counsel us against being on history’s “wrong side.” Yet the most destructive way to be politically wrong begins with the belief that history has any sides at all. The theoretical masterminds and world-spirit channelers preaching otherwise have repeatedly led their followers not to a promised land but to perdition. 

History is not without patterns, but these have little to do with meditated purpose. It certainly reveals some important long-term trends. Technological advance, for one, has been steady and cumulative. Far-sighted planning, however, has played little role in its march; piecemeal tinkering being the principal mother of invention. Moreover, invention’s products have been consonant with a wide variety of social and moral regimes, for which progress is much less in evidence. 

There are also classes of events of reliable periodicity. One can confidently predict recurring warfare, economic cycles, and the ebb and flow of epidemics and famines. But these episodic phenomena reflect enduring aspects of human and natural behavior regularly manifesting themselves, not an unfolding design. Contra Hegel, history has no objectives, cunning belonging solely to the humans who, when trying to assay its larger shape, are generally too cunning by half. 

History’s greatest consistency lies in its unexpectedness, most painfully evident when the best and the brightest claim to be its seers, or worse yet, its steerers. Surviving in history’s swirling currents is more like white water rafting than navigation. If disaster is to be avoided, oarsmen need to concentrate on staying upright amidst the maelstrom, not on mapping ultimate destinations. 

It’s not hard to find conspicuous examples of big-time plans gone sadly awry, as they so frequently do. 

Among the most instructive, in its own darkly amusing way, was a mini-utopian project, announced at the 20th century’s onset by the leading lights of American social science and humanism. Basking in the reflected glory of their academic neighbors, the natural scientists, they imagined themselves endowed with analogous powers of rigorous inquiry and corporate self-discipline. From this misapprehension flowed a momentous, though quite sincere, error of forecast: if only insulated from the meddling of ignorant outsiders, professors would turn the university into a temple of reason—instead of, as they then saw it, the servant of commercial and clerical interests. Such a consummation would require almost complete professorial freedom to hire, fire, and render scholarly judgment, with lifetime tenure, after a brief apprenticeship, as the bedrock guarantee of their power. By the second half of the 20th century, this imperial concept of academic freedom had conquered all the university’s heights. 

The outcome? America’s institutions of higher learning became almost mirror images of the original hope. Few other organizations are as scabrously political, including actually elected ones where majorities at least tolerate and often work with minorities. Few are as patronage-ridden, bureaucratically mired, and downright clownish. In retrospect, academe’s founding fathers would have done better to adopt the principles commonly used to control other expert institutions, such as active public oversight. Their pretensions to objective science, however, got the better of them. 

If the most acute of minds could so misread the likely evolution of processes with which they were intimately familiar, what prospects have the less endowed when embarking on their other grand schemes? 

Decisions to go to war, with their mushrooming ramifications and escalating stakes, have been routinely confounding. Once released, war’s dogs run where they will, their “masters” would be compelled to follow, by honor and necessity. World War I is the quintessential modern case, all parties wracked and many wrecked by its unforeseen catastrophes. World War II ended somewhat closer to expectations for the democratic victors, notwithstanding major power losses for some and the rise of a formidable new adversary for all. For the losers, the surprises were terminal. 

The small wars embarked upon by the United States after 1945 offer similar lessons, most notably those intended to spread democratic values. But liberals haven’t been the only ones flummoxed. Vladimir Putin no doubt believed he had carefully considered the consequences when he ordered his tanks to roll down to Kyiv. Warfare does at times succeed in its strategic purpose. Bismarck had a knack for correctly calling his martial shots, and Margaret Thatcher successfully gambled in the Falklands. More typically, Louis XIV of France, Philip II of Spain, Edward III of England, and a host of other belligerent rulers grossly underestimated what they were getting into and the price they and their subjects would have to pay for their military adventures. 

But above all else, it is the great schemes of human redemption that most invariably come a cropper, affording illustrations of the fatuity of forecast even starker than does warfare. 

Modern times begin with the Reformation, a sustained effort at Christian purification and renewal. Where did that lead? Some form of Protestantism took hold in numerous principalities, and Catholicism strengthened itself intellectually and organizationally elsewhere. But the theologians’ bitter wrangling and the accompanying battlefield carnage helped bring about a disenchantment and worldliness that has marked the West ever since. The future belonged less to Luther and Ignatius than to Voltaire and d’Holbach. 

On then to the Age of Reason. How fully were the idylls of its enlightened realized? The triumph of natural science and its material enrichments would certainly have pleased them. So, too, would have heightened religious tolerance. Here they foresaw correctly. What the polite habitués of the salons missed, however, were the demons that free thought would also release. Did they imagine themselves erecting guillotines? Was revolutionary warfare on a continental scale part of their program? Would they have owned their communist epigones, had they seen them coming? 

The expectations of communism’s leaders, self-proclaimed authorities on dialectical necessity though they were, were more contradicted than those of the philosophes—and without any saving graces. Instead of entering utopia, their proletarian proteges were enserfed, starved, and savaged. And not only was a world not won, but their revolutionary clamors ignited a backfire of tribal dystopias, whose “us-versus-them” creeds rivaled the gore-letting of the levelers.

As astounding as the actual future would have been for seers past, our future is going to be more so—and not only that of several decades hence, but probably that of just a few years down the road. Why? Because we’ve come to an event horizon, beyond which the projection of even the best-established trajectories will often miss the mark. 

The world we’re now entering will be a very alien place. In comparison to, say, the world of the 1980s, it already is. Who saw at the beginning of that decade the collapse of Soviet Communism and the breakup of Russia? Or, following that, the collapse of self-respect among the Cold War’s putative victors, demographic implosion among the world’s best housed, fed, and medicated populations, the globalization of militant Islam, the heavy migrations of Third Worlders to the West, social media’s hothouse politics and social isolation, or the rise of gender ideology. In hindsight, advances in birth control, communications, transportation, computation, and the massification of higher education combined to make these things happen. Yet, just a generation earlier, most of these developments were impossible to foresee.

This is future shock as already witnessed. It’s nothing compared to what’s about to come. The main instigator will be artificial intelligence, though all the developments just mentioned will also continue to evolve, mutate, and interact in unexpected ways. We can only guess what these eventualities will be in their specifics. We can be sure, however, that they will crash loudly upon the future’s shores. 

Put aside for a moment the warnings about AI routinely heard; that it lends itself to all manner of government and corporate abuse and might eject most people from their jobs, which are undoubtedly real concerns. Other potent disturbers, rarely discussed, also lurk in the forests of technology. 

Here’s one: Research enabling the mute to command machines via thought is now groping forward. Right now, implants are required to decode brain activity. But consider the consequences of breakthroughs in mind-machine interfaces that would allow for remote signal detection—brain Wi-Fi rather than cable, so to speak. The authorities, or even our friends, neighbors, and spouses, might then be able to mindread, if not detail, at least emotional tenor and general intention. Social life, as we know it, requires mental privacy. What would its impairment mean?

The greatest potential disturber is super-intelligent AI. Assuming its possibility, what might follow? If future AI combined mighty intelligence with independent agency, its genesis would be equivalent to the arrival of extraterrestrials. Could Australian aboriginals, insular Polynesians, or the relatively civilized Aztecs and Incas have had any way of anticipating what the appearance of Europeans would mean for their futures? Before the possibility of superintelligent AI, all flesh-and-blood mortals stand similarly befogged.

If, in the past, the future was at best to be spied through a glass darkly, that glass is now virtually opaque, more a mirror really, reflecting the fossilized expectations and wish-fulfillment desires of those gazing into it more than anything actually on the other side.

What approach to governing is most appropriate to such opacity? Perhaps just to sit tight and hope for the best. Realistically, one could do a lot worse. But let’s try to be a bit more helpful.

In normal times, governments do their best by protecting us against preventable evils—those closely attached to the constant elements of human nature—while creating as few evils as possible themselves. Good political practice is thus generally a relatively modest, myopic, short-term affair, obeying Hippocrates’s prime directive of “do no harm.” This mainly boils down to maintaining order at and within national frontiers and preserving an environment in which citizens can pursue their constructive private purposes with minimal hindrance. 

Unfortunately, not many governments have ever met this modest mark, their habitual practice being wealth extraction, which inflicts evil on most everyone but the extractors. The ideal of modest governance would thus hold true even under conditions of normal opacity. Given the current near-total ones, such governance is all the more imperative. 

Policy myopia isn’t the same as utter blindness. Longer-term political projects aimed at resource enhancement have been, and remain, sensible. From time immemorial, sagacious rulers have taxed their subjects to stock granaries, build irrigation systems, and lay out roads and canals. These endeavors addressed cyclical, hence predictable, emergencies by enhancing systemic resilience. The same thing was true for ensuring military preparedness. Other forms of infrastructure investment may also be warranted. 

Even forceful (and thus high-risk/high-cost) policies can be justified in circumstances where there is a clear and present danger of high-cost harm. Revolutionary attempts—a symptom of reckless foretelling at its worst—should be vigorously suppressed when they have any imminence. Repelling foreign attack falls in the same category. 

Policies aiming at comprehensive social change or requiring broad, costly interventions into the flow of everyday life have never been likely to succeed, for reasons with which conservatives are already familiar. They have too many moving parts, too many unintended outcomes, and hide too many selfish agendas. Acute uncertainty about future circumstances only accentuates these problems. Thus, the unprecedented demographic contraction of the developed world is rapidly accelerating the disintegration of the welfare state, which many believed was here to stay. The post-war baby boom made the welfare state’s expanding benefactions seem indefinitely supportable. How many of its architects back then foresaw the coming dearth or fed it into their calculations? Hadn’t technological advancement and population growth reliably gone hand-in-hand? 

The climate crusade has also incautiously assumed a future much like the past. Even if the science linking carbon emissions to global warming is unimpeachable, the unknowable state of future mitigations likely makes any regime of economic constriction self-defeating. The costly trouble climate scientists imagine, such as desertification and coastal flooding, assume remedies limited to current technology. Open-ended economic expansion, with all its unpredictable innovations, is therefore a far better option for addressing climate change than the no-growth policies politicians and activists routinely urge.

Likewise, military campaigns aimed at universalizing constitutional government assume a good understanding of its social preconditions. Constitutionalism’s surprisingly rapid erosion on its home turf suggests that we no longer have it.

Counterrevolutionary dreams are equally doomed. Restorations are, at best, only partially successful. General Franco stopped the Communists, but there was no bringing back traditional, Catholic Spain. Likewise, the separation of powers, checks and balances, and federalism that characterized the American republic prior to the 1930s, or even the 1960s, now belong to the ages. And those who seek to rekindle American greatness by returning culturally or demographically to its mid-20th century state only kid themselves. The hard social reversals required would so disrupt America as to leave it a place as foreign as the woke, managerial reconstruction toward which conservatives now see it sliding. You can sometimes make things better, or stop them from becoming worse, but you can never go home again.

A rare prediction that is generally reliable involves what happens when rulers occasionally have the discipline to govern in a benignly myopic spirit. Given a modicum of luck, some degree of human flourishing is thereby attained. In these fortunate dispensations, history’s cunning, in all its inscrutability, is wisely left to itself.