The end of history as a guide: Artificial intelligence is a sharp break, not just another tech revolution

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. The end of history’ is a fool’s title. It invites mockery the way a tall poppy invites a scythe.

When Francis Fukuyama used it in 1989, it was ridiculed. Critics pointed to wars and coups as proof that history was alive and well. They missed his point, but their reaction birthed a rule: never use a title that claims the past is over.

Let’s break that rule to make a narrower, uglier point. Historical analysis, treated as our primary compass, has become misleading. The temptation to look backward is a biological instinct; when the forest creates a new sound, the amygdala scans memory for a match.

A twig snap may be a predator; a rustle mere wind. History works as a guide most of the time, which is exactly what makes it lethal when it does not. In AI, since the release of ChatGPT and DeepSeek’s open-weight shock to the rise of autonomous coding agents like Claude Code, breath-takers have become routine.

We no longer debate if productivity will rise; we ask if our notions of a ‘job’ and a ‘firm’ were ever stable. Pattern-matching still works for the cyclical theatre of stock markets, but in the real world, reaching for historical reassurance is risky. Tyranny of the decimal: There is a mathematical violence in recent developments that analysts miss.

For years, the consensus was that AI could assist with code but not produce reliable systems because even a 1% error rate compounds brutally. Statistically, a 1% ‘hallucination’ rate per line guarantees the failure of a 500-line program. But we have moved from GPT-4 to a ‘collapse of the decimal.’ When the error rate drops to 0.01%, possibilities explode.