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We Must Read the AI Moment within the Long History of Technology
Figure 1: The integration of artificial intelligence and data-driven systems into economic production, institutional governance and social decision-making.
The Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) represents a radical departure from previous large-scale waves of transformational change. It is more consequential vis-à-vis the breadth, depth, and pace at which it is reconfiguring nature, existing social formations and modes of production. But this new techno-scientific wave, despite its distinctive disruptive power and singular configuration, is founded and built upon preceding waves. After all, a materialist and scientific analysis demonstrates that the technological story is one of cumulative evolution and a sequential continuum incorporating the totality of natural, economic, socio-technical, and subjective constituents that preceded it. We can see this chain of cause and effect when we examine the techno-societal journey of humanity retroactively. The march for innovation, invention and advancement in technical and scientific knowledge has been long. The technical passage from Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, the Indus Valley, the Islamic Golden Age, Greece, Rome and finally Europe and the United States does not indicate linearity nor Eurocentrism but an epic that is cyclical, episodical and multi-layered.
What was the real source of this long techno-historical miracle? Not culture, nor race or religion, but the motor that drove these techno-scientific waves was a dialectical synthesis of collective creativity, ingenuity, the labour and life-activity of humanity feeding into specific productive forces. Skills, the embodied knowledge of working humanity; the tools, instruments, and utilities fashioned through centuries of experimentation by previous generations; the division of labour that coordinated collective effort, and the technical know-how that gradually crystallised into systematic scientific knowledge. Nor was the decline of successive techno-scientific regimes the result of the Geist moving on to its next destination, as stage theorists like Niall Ferguson and David Landes would have it. This Toynbean narrative of civilisational rise, peak and abandonment bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the movement of offshore capital: a society is animated, its labour and knowledge extracted, its productive potential exhausted, and the Spirit then relocates, clean and unburdened, to its next host.
What this idealist developmentalist account of technology cannot explain is what a materialist one must. Strip away for a moment the tribalism, geopolitical rivalry, and civilisational provincialism that so often colour this history. What remains is a more fundamental and possibly far more interesting story. The long techno-scientific march of humanity has been, beneath its surface conflicts and uneven developments, a snowballing and cooperative enterprise in which each formation built upon, absorbed, and transmitted the productive knowledge of those who came before. This cooperation was never frictionless or symmetrical. The rise and weakening of successive techno-scientific regimes was conditioned by ecological failures, wars and conflicts, shifting configurations of social relations, and modes of surplus extraction that set the material limits of each civilisational formation.
Just as no species evolves in a vacuum but only in constant metabolic exchange with its environment and neighbouring organisms, no socio-technical formation has developed or declined in isolation. Productive knowledge, institutional innovations, and technical know-how continued to flow across boundaries, ensuring that even decline was generative. This is precisely what Lewis Mumford’s masterpiece Technic and Civilization ([1934] 2010) demonstrated against the progressivism and Eurocentrism of the mainstream account: that pre-modern, pre-capitalist techno-societal regimes were never divorced from our existing world, that technique precedes and conditions consciousness itself. In Mumford’s words, ‘men had become mechanical before they perfected complicated machines to express their new bent and interest’ (Mumford, [1934] 2010, p.3). It is not Toynbee but Darwin who is invoked here. There are no absolute falls or radical ruptures in the technological story, only transitions and supercedents. Each civilisational moment deposits its productive knowledge, tools, and organisational forms into the living body of human history, where they persist as the genetic material of every subsequent techno-scientific development.
Yet cumulation alone does not exhaust the story. As Marx observed in his critique of Darwin, the theory of natural selection illuminates the gradual quantitative accumulation of adaptive change but cannot fully account for the moments when quantity tips into quality, when incremental development suddenly crystallises into a new form of life altogether. The technological story follows a similar logic. As historians of science like Shapin (2018) have noted, it is in the First Industrial Revolution (1760-1840) that techno-scientific development assumed precisely such a qualitative threshold: not merely more of what came before, but a systemic reorganisation. And yet even this qualitative leap was genetically rooted in what preceded it. The stone hammer and axe emerged from prior embodied practices, and irrigation from earlier agrarian experimentation; the factory system itself did not arise ex nihilo. It was the cumulative outcome of centuries of artisanal craft production, commercial expansion, proto-industrial workshop organisation, metallurgical advances, and increasingly disciplined mass labour coordination.
This evolutionary process continued with the steam-powered factory system and its attendant transformations in labour organisation, financial structures, and industrial infrastructure. These steam-driven energy innovations, pioneered by Thomas Newcomen and James Watt, became the dialectical basis for Edison and Tesla’s electrification of society during the Second Industrial Revolution (1870–1940). Their technological breakthrough was itself enabled by the scientific developments of Volta, Faraday, and Maxwell. Subsequently, Lenoir and Otto’s internal combustion engine (1890s) paved the way for automated production, the military-industrial complex (tanks, planes, machine guns), computer systems, Marc Andreesen’s world-wide web and network browser, digital technologies, and information technology—all of which characterised the Third Industrial Revolution (1950s-2000s) (Ede, 2021).
Each innovation episode inaugurated profound socio-economic, cultural, spatial, temporal and ideological reconfigurations. Technological transformation and dispersion unfolded within the uneven and combined development of global capitalism, intensifying both productive capacity and social polarisation. Infrastructural change did not diffuse neutrally; it reorganised labour, concentrated ownership, and restructured political power everywhere. Let us take the steam engine as an illustration of how technology and science lead to what Mumford called the ‘great re-orientation’. Andreas Malm’s Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming (2016) demonstrates that the rise of steam power in nineteenth-century Britain was not the inevitable triumph of efficiency, but the outcome of the systemic logic of capital accumulation utilising technology. In Britain, steam displaced water not because rivers were exhausted, but because coal-based stock energy enabled factory owners to concentrate labour in urban centres, discipline and control workers more effectively, and detach production from the geographical constraints of flow energy. The shift to fossil fuels thus bound energy regimes to new spatial forms of industrial urbanisation and intensified state and class power. By the 1830s, fossil energy became inseparable from colonial and imperial expansion, the large-scale extraction of resources from colonised territories, and the accelerating metabolic rift between industrial society and the natural world. Malm, following the likes of Samir Amin and Immanuel Wallerstein, argues that the modern global economy was structured through this carbon-intensive regime, operating via unequal exchange, racialised economic subordination, and the systematic super-exploitation of labour and nature across the Global South (Malm, 2016).
Why undertake this historical reconstruction at all when our topic at hand is AI? Why trace the long arc from stone tools and irrigation to steam, electricity, combustion, and digital computation? What do all these have to do with AI? The answer lies in recognising that our contemporary conjuncture and world is not an isolated rupture, but the latest phase in an evolutionary sequence of techno-scientific regimes. It was J.D. Bernal, the eminent historian of science, who argued that each industrial transformation synthesises prior techniques while transcending them, reorganising the productive forces and the social relations in which they are embedded. In Chapter 1 of Science in History (1988), in a section titled The Cumulative Tradition of Science, Bernal reminds us that scientific and technical development is cumulative: our present engineers, technologists, technicians and ‘scientists would be of little avail if he had not at his disposal an immense stock of previous knowledge and experience’ (Bernal, 1988, p. 43). What appears as rupture is grounded in sedimented layers of inherited collective labour, knowledge, experience, and experimentation of humanity.
Our contemporary Algithmic-capitalo-statist conjuncture is characterised by a set of processes, relations and innovations that consists of the synthesis and transcendence of the earlier aforementioned techniques and technological systems. The artificial intelligence revolution does not replace steam, electricity, combustion, or digital infrastructure; it synthesises and integrates them into a new computational-civilisational regime that penetrates the epistemic and material core of social life and order. The deep learning breakthroughs associated with Fei-Fei Li’s ImageNet project at Stanford, the 2012 AlexNet model of Alex Krizhevsky, Geoffrey Hinton and collaborators, DeepMind’s AlphaGo victory under Demis Hassabis in 2016, and the subsequent emergence of large-scale generative models (LLMs) developed by firms such as OpenAI, Google or Claude mark this consolidation. We can state the above differently. That if steam mechanised muscle, and electrification coordinated energy, AI digitalises cognition. AI is what Marx described as the ‘general intellect’ becoming a direct force of production for the current civilisational order.
This hegemonisation of these systems and tools is not an accident. These variegated AI systems have been consolidated and propelled by an unprecedented alignment of state hegemony and geopolitical competition spearheaded by the United States, elite strategy, venture capital financing, hyperscale computational infrastructure, and mass data extraction. What is being extracted? Shoshana Zuboff calls it ‘behavioural surplus’. This is not merely information in the abstract, but living human activity itself. It is the Lukácsian reification of gestures, preferences, movements, communication, and attention. Everything human, all too human, both content and conduct, is converted into a digitally calculable substrate. It is this transformation of lived human activity into machinic-readable data that lubricates and accelerates the expanding computational apparatus of an emerging computational civilisation and its institutional architecture.
This alignment, in turn, is driving the diffusion of these systems into the productive and epistemic core of firms, universities, media institutions, financial institutions, military establishments, and public administrations. Being, knowing, living, and the institutions of the market and governance are increasingly tied together via data extraction and algorithmic systems. These AI systems sift, weight, classify and generate probabilistic outputs from millions of data points in real time, thereby reorganising decision-making, coordination and authority through computational mediation. What once appeared as relatively discrete domains of life are now increasingly integrated within a unified data-processing cloud-based infrastructure. Technicality, efficiency, and instrumental rationality, the Enlightenment’s promise radicalised through neoliberal capitalist optimisation, converge in ‘Dataism’. ‘Like capitalism, Dataism too began as a neutral scientific theory, but is now mutating into a religion that claims to determine right and wrong. The supreme value of this new pseudo-religion is “information flow” (Harari, 2016). Is it therefore no surprise that how we think, how we communicate, how decisions are made, how labour and social life are organised, how we feel, how knowledge is produced and, more importantly, how economic and political power is exercised, are being reorganised, centralized and monopolised in real time.
In other words, digital novel techniques and technologies led by AI are truly reconfiguring all that humanity has known since the Palaeolithic and Neolithic ages. Today, the artificial intelligence revolution has the capacity to blur the internal subjective and external objective correlations, to systematically reconfigure our bio-physiology, to re-orient and shift our social relations and interactions, and to contribute to the withering away of our political, economic, and cultural institutions, from health, education, media, military, and telecommunications to the state. And even more radical is an ontological and existential transition or reconfiguration of what constitutes who and what we are as a species. In other words, the role of the human-animal, the homo laborans and homo faber, in the age of AI and beyond is radically changing (Harari, 2017, p. 324).
However, this accelerated pace of technological advancement has been met with complex and multifaceted local and global challenges. These include the uneven ownership, access, distribution, and utilisation of AI within and across geopolitical zones; the lack of systematic analysis of unforeseen risks and opportunities in AI development and deployment; and the absence of robust regulatory frameworks capable of ensuring effective oversight (Cath et al., 2018; Crawford & Calo, 2016, p. 313). There is also the increasingly visible concentration of AI infrastructure and computational capacity within Silicon Valley firms, closely interwoven with the imperial strategic interests of the Trump-run American state and its now openly violent military and security apparatuses. The structural asymmetries of AI infrastructure have been empirically analysed in the context of Southeast and South Asian economies, where digital sovereignty policies often address only the surface layer of technological dependency without challenging the underlying power structures that maintain foreign control over critical digital infrastructure (Rana & Azeez, 2025a, 2025b). One can forgive a techno-pessimist for thinking that the contribution of AI systems today has been the massacring and bombing of Iranians and Palestinians, the imprisonment of black and Hispanic minorities, according to an algorithmically run judiciary. The line between public and private, local and global, is becoming increasingly vague—the relation between Israel, Palantir, and ICE is a good example of this. German, Canadian and British companies integrated with Turkish drones that daily massacre Kurdish villagers in the Zagros mountains is another case. This asymmetry between the rapid production, permeation and expansion of AI, and the limited awareness, accessibility, governance and democratic oversight surrounding it reflects the growing concentration of computational power within an increasingly fused state and corporate apparatus. This consolidation narrows the social and political space through which societies can meaningfully comprehend, contest and direct the trajectory of this technological transformation.
Such centralisation and monopolisation of technological and military power in the hands of a small group of humans provide serious grounds for critique, and even anxiety. Scholars such as Mejias and Couldry (2019) have begun to draw analogies between the AI moment and 1492, arguing that new forms of data extraction risk inaugurating a regime of ‘digital colonialism’. Indeed, the concept of Indigenous data sovereignty has been advanced as a critical counter-framework for resisting digital colonialism and demanding that Indigenous peoples govern the collection, ownership, and application of data about their communities (Rana, 2025; Rana & Azeez, 2025). The question that comes to mind is this: what or who is being colonised? The planet? Humanity? Across the political spectrum, others have also invoked 1492, though for different reasons and via different methodologies. Varoufakis describes the present conjuncture as ‘techno-feudalism’, while the more conservative Joel Kotkin characterises it as an emerging ‘neo-feudalism’ (Varoufakis, 2023; Kotkin, 2024). If 1492 is remembered as the year of planetary conquest and comparison, then perhaps Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America (1971) should guide our reading of the present. Artificial Intelligence does not arrive with visible fleets or armed expeditions. It does not declare conquest. It advances through resource extraction, data centres, code, platforms, data extraction, and infrastructural integration. All in the name of efficiency and statistics. If 1492 marked the seizure of land, labour, and natural wealth, the present moment does not abandon those mechanisms but extends them. Territories, societies, bodies, cultures, and environments continue to be appropriated, classified and ranked through global supply chains, resource extraction, and military projection.
But the dialectical spiral of technological regimes and social systems ensures that the AI moment is also qualitatively different. What is added is a new frontier: data, behavioural surplus, predictive capacity, and an unprecedented architecture of surveillance and targeted lethality. Surveillance and what Achille Mbembe called ‘necro-politics’ are no longer only territorial and mass, but increasingly personalised, data-driven, and algorithmically optimised. This is not to suggest that systematic and indiscriminate geopolitical massacres have disappeared. As mentioned, the automated targeting and AI-assisted systems deployed in Gaza, and the technologically mediated assaults upon Kurdish regions such as Rojava, the massacre of Iranian young girls in their school, and the profiling and imprisoning via facial recognition everywhere, demonstrate that computational infrastructures are now directly entangled with military projection, occupation, and population control. The same predictive models, data-fusion systems, and optimisation logics that organise logistics, markets, and communication networks also structure surveillance grids, target identification, and battlefield coordination.
Where earlier empires occupied geography, contemporary systems increasingly enclose information, attention, and cognition. This enclosure does not replace material domination; it intensifies and refines it. Foundation models, LLMs, predictive analytics, and autonomous platforms structure economic allocation, scientific discovery, military logistics, financial markets, and public communication. The terrain of contestation is therefore expanded rather than displaced. As hybrid Algorithmic-driven wars in Ukraine, Iran, Afghanistan and Mexico intensify, one must take care not to universalise and fall into the trap of pessimism. Others show us the other side of this moment. They interpret this development differently. Unlike the techno-pessimists and critical theorists, Ray Kurzweil (2005) envisions the emergence of AI and superintelligence as the pathway toward a technological singularity and human transcendence. Similarly, Peter Diamandis (2012) anticipates an era of radical abundance, the death of work, and longevity driven by these new technologies. In such readings, AI does not inaugurate enclosure or domination, but emancipation and post-scarcity transformation. Which horizon is more plausible remains unsettled. Nothing is determined, and the social scene is an open playground for different forces to shape the moment. Whether these techno-pessimistic or optimistic projections will materialise remains to be seen.
What is certain is that this moment holds openly divergent pathways. It could widen access to resources, liberate humanity from work and radically increase access to knowledge and coordination on an unprecedented scale. It could also intensify asymmetries of ownership, surveillance, agency and control. Technology alone does not determine the direction of travel. The outcome will depend upon the property regimes, social relations and concrete practices through which AI is designed, developed, owned, and governed. If collective political consciousness, awareness and agency do not rise to meet this transformation, humanity may find itself subordinated within systems it has created but cannot meaningfully steer. The question is not whether AI will divide epochs, but whether political and institutional capacity will mature alongside technical power—whether social organisation can keep pace with computational acceleration. It is whether we will shape this emerging order or be shaped by it.