Henry Adams and Artificial Intelligence: A Speculative Reading
Henry Adams and Artificial Intelligence: A Speculative Reading
Henry Adams was one of the most important American thinkers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Born in 1838 into one of the nation’s most prominent political families, he was the great-grandson of John Adams and the grandson of John Quincy Adams. Yet Adams did not become president, and he spent much of his life wrestling with what it meant to inherit a powerful past while living through a world being remade by railroads, electricity, industry, empire, and modern science. He worked as a journalist, historian, editor, professor, and cultural critic, and his best-known book, The Education of Henry Adams, became one of the most unusual autobiographies in American literature. It is less a story of personal triumph than a record of intellectual dislocation. Adams wanted to understand why the old explanations no longer seemed adequate for the modern world. That poses a question: what would Henry Adams think of Artificial Intelligence? Through my research and that of others, this essay attempts to speculate on the thoughts and concerns that a Preeminent Historian and cultural critic would have about this particular piece of technology.
Startled, yes. Uneasy, certainly. Intellectually fascinated, absolutely. But not surprised. Of all nineteenth-century American historians, Adams was among the most prepared to understand AI not as a gadget, not as a passing invention, and not merely as a labor-saving device, but as a new historical force. He would have seen it as another stage in the long transfer of power away from inherited institutions, moral traditions, and human-centered explanations toward impersonal systems of energy, information, calculation, and control.
In The Education of Henry Adams, Adams repeatedly presents himself as a man educated for one world and forced to live in another. His old education had prepared him for politics, diplomacy, classical learning, and moral judgment. The world he actually encountered was increasingly shaped by railroads, telegraphs, steam power, electricity, finance capitalism, and industrial machinery. Samuele Pardini argues that The Education is not simply autobiography, but a sustained attempt to understand the relationship between technology and society. Adams treated technology as historically central, not merely symbolic, and tried to map the changes technologies set in motion within a larger historical framework.
Artificial intelligence would have struck Adams as the newest and perhaps most unsettling form of what he called “force.”
In “A Dynamic Theory of History,” Adams defined progress as “the development and economy of Forces” and described force as anything that does work. He then made the more disturbing claim that human beings do not simply capture forces. Rather, forces capture human beings. Man, in Adams’s formulation, becomes the product of the forces that attract, educate, shape, and control him. AI would fit neatly, and ominously, into that framework. It does work. It organizes information. It accelerates decisions. It reshapes labor, education, war, politics, writing, memory, and knowledge. To Adams, that would mean AI is not just a tool. It is a historical force acting upon the human mind.
He likely would have compared AI to the dynamo.
At the Paris Exposition of 1900, Adams famously stood before the dynamo and treated it almost as a religious object of the modern age. The dynamo represented a new source of power, mysterious in its reach and difficult for older forms of education to explain. Freda Fuller-Coursey notes that Adams framed history through opposing “fixed points”: medieval unity, symbolized by the Virgin, and twentieth-century multiplicity, symbolized by the Dynamo and industrialization. AI would have seemed to Adams like the dynamo’s descendant. Electricity multiplied physical power. AI multiplies intellectual, administrative, and symbolic power. The dynamo transformed energy. AI transforms cognition.
That distinction would have mattered deeply to him.
Adams worried that modern life had become too complex for old systems of understanding. In the chapter on “The Height of Knowledge,” he described a world increasingly ruled by impersonal powers such as coal, industrial systems, and vast geopolitical forces. Coal, in his phrasing, had become an emperor. Political boundaries mattered, but energy systems mattered more. AI would have appeared to him as another emperor, though stranger than coal because it would not merely move ships, factories, and armies. It would move thought.
He would have admired AI’s power to classify, correlate, and predict, but he would not have trusted it.
Adams longed for a “science of history.” Fuller-Coursey explains that Adams hoped historians might use evidence, documents, and scientific methods to understand the past, explain the present, and possibly predict the future. Yet Adams also understood instability, randomness, and irreversible change as central historical problems. That tension is exactly where Adams would place AI. He would be tempted by its promise. A machine that reads masses of documents, detects patterns, models change over time, and forecasts outcomes would look like the historian’s dream. It would seem to offer the “spool” on which Adams hoped to wind the thread of history without breaking it.
But Adams would also suspect that AI’s predictions might reproduce the very arrogance he feared in modern science. He would ask: Does the machine understand causation, or does it merely arrange appearances? Does it reveal historical order, or does it manufacture the illusion of order? Does it deepen judgment, or does it replace judgment with pattern recognition?
That skepticism would be especially sharp because Adams cared about education. In David Buie’s essay on Adams, Adams appears fundamentally as an educator, a thinker concerned that twentieth-century students lacked useful guides for understanding the modern world. The essay notes Adams’s dissatisfaction with older educational forms and his desire to teach students something “not wholly useless” in an age of steam, electricity, and new measures of force. AI would have intensified that concern. Adams would likely see modern students surrounded by powerful tools but poorly prepared to understand the systems behind them. He would not ask only whether students could use AI. He would ask whether AI had educated them, weakened them, or quietly trained them to stop thinking historically.
He would also recognize AI as a political problem.
Pardini emphasizes that Adams treated technological innovation as political because it affected the organization of modern society and the meaning of intellectual work. Technology, in this reading, was not neutral. It shaped democratic life, cultural forms, and the role of the intellectual. Adams would apply the same logic to AI. Who owns it? Who trains it? Who benefits from it? Who becomes obsolete because of it? Who controls the data? Who controls the conclusions? Who mistakes machine output for truth?
Here Adams would likely be severe. He had already seen industrial capitalism centralize power. He had watched machines, corporations, finance, and empire diminish older republican ideals. AI would appear to him as another centralizing force, but one operating not only through factories or railroads, but through language itself. A technology that can produce reports, summarize evidence, imitate style, draft policy, generate propaganda, and influence public opinion would have confirmed his fear that modern society had outrun its moral education.
At the same time, Adams would not simply reject AI. That would be too easy, and Adams was rarely easy.
He would probably insist that “somehow the machine had to run,” a phrase Pardini highlights as central to Adams’s recognition that modern society could not simply retreat from technological complexity. Adams was no simple nostalgic medievalist. He looked backward to look forward. He studied the Virgin and the Dynamo not because he thought history could return to Chartres, but because he wanted to understand what had been lost, what had been gained, and what kind of education the new world required.
So what would Adams think of AI?
He would call it a dynamo of mind.
He would see it as a force that compresses time, multiplies information, destabilizes authority, and exposes the inadequacy of inherited education. He would admire its power and distrust its promises. He would understand why governments, universities, corporations, and armies wanted it. He would also fear that human beings, imagining themselves masters of the machine, had again mistaken their position. In Adams’s dynamic theory, people do not stand outside the forces of history. They are acted upon by them. AI would not merely serve modern society. It would educate modern society, in the broad and dangerous sense Adams gave that word.
And Adams would likely end with a warning: the central question is not whether artificial intelligence can think like a human being. The more important question is whether human beings, living under the pressure of artificial intelligence, can still think historically.
That, for Adams, would be the real crisis.
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