Is AI just the next disruptor in a long line of world-changing technologies, or is it something genuinely new? Dr. Jason Ross Arnold, professor and chair of the Department of Political Science and an affiliated faculty member in the Department of Computer Science, tackles this question by placing artificial intelligence within the longer arc of technologies that have reshaped American democracy—from steam power and radio to the Bomb and the Internet. Drawing on these historical cases, the lecture examines how sweeping technological change has repeatedly transformed both democratic institutions and everyday civic life, and asks whether AI's current disruptions follow a familiar historical pattern or mark a genuine break from everything that came before.

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