What the Age of Revolutions and Total War Bequeathed to Us

Conclusion and Opening Toward the Next Period (1945-Present)

Here we are at the end of a century and a half of journey — the most brutal of our crossing. From the libraries of Timbuktu hidden in attics to the secret laboratories of Bletchley Park, from Maya codices thrown into flames to Ramanujan's notebooks that have not finished yielding their secrets, from the stars of the Polynesian compass to Rutherford's atomic nuclei — six continents, one hundred and fifty-six years of history, and everywhere the same paradox: simultaneous flowering and destruction, foundations being built while others collapse.

This period — from the revolutions of 1789 to the total war of 1945 — was when artificial intelligence became possible. Leibniz's binary system finally found its embodiment in Shannon and Nakashima's circuits. Boole's algebra encountered electrical relays. Turing's universal machine ceased to be an abstraction and became Colossus, then ENIAC. The concepts forged during the Early Modern period took shape in metal and electricity.

But this period was also one of planetary-scale epistemicide. Wherever Europe extended its dominion — and it extended it almost everywhere — knowledge systems were destroyed, marginalized, forgotten. The African Ifa, Japanese wasan, Maya codices, Aboriginal astronomy, Inca quipus, the Arab-Islamic scientific tradition: so many ways of thinking about calculation, logic, and memory that were swept away or forced into silence. The artificial intelligence we build today was born from this double movement — creation and destruction, forge and inferno.

What Unites: The Red Threads of a Century of Iron

Five threads run through this period, weaving a fabric found from one continent to another.

Epistemicide as policy.

The destruction of knowledge was never an accident of history. It was a deliberate policy, because a plurality of ideas would have undermined colonialism itself. In Africa, colonizers destroyed libraries and marginalized Ifa priests. In the Americas, Diego de Landa burned Maya codices and residential schools tore children from their families. In Asia, Macaulay's system in India created a class "English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect," while colonial Japan erased Korean culture. In the Middle East, post-Sykes-Picot colonialism fragmented the Arab world and interrupted the Nahda. In Oceania, the legal fiction of terra nullius denied sixty-five thousand years of human presence, and the Stolen Generations completed what massacres had begun. Everywhere, the same pattern: to justify domination, it was necessary to deny the sophistication of those being dominated.

The exile of geniuses.

The best minds of each continent had to leave their homeland to flourish. Ramanujan left for Cambridge. Hassan Kamel Al-Sabbah set sail for the United States. Ernest Rutherford and Alexander Aitken left New Zealand for England. Jewish scholars from Germany and Austria fled to America. Benjamin Banneker could not leave anywhere — but his astronomical calculations proved that genius has no color. This hemorrhage of talents reveals a bitter truth: structures matter more than individuals. A genius without institutions remains a genius, but his discoveries die with him. Al-Sabbah filed seventy-three patents — for General Electric. Rutherford trained a generation of Nobel Prize winners — at Manchester and Cambridge, not Wellington.

The invisibilization of contributors.

What is recognized as "foundational" depends on who writes the history. The Ifa system contained binary logic centuries before Leibniz — but Leibniz is in the textbooks, not the Babalawo. Seki Takakazu discovered infinitesimal calculus independently of Newton — but we speak of "Japan's Newton," not "Europe's Seki." Akira Nakashima formulated switching circuit theory before Shannon — but Shannon is the reference. Ada Lovelace wrote the first computer program — and was ignored for a century. The women of Bletchley Park operated Colossus — and were erased for decades. The ENIAC programmers — Betty Holberton, Kay McNulty, and their colleagues — were in the background of photos, never named. This invisibilization is not an accident. It is the product of power relations that determine what deserves to be seen.

Parallel discoveries.

Great ideas emerge multiple times, in places that know nothing of each other. Seki and Newton. Nakashima and Shannon. Zuse in Berlin and Turing in Cambridge. Ramanujan finding alone what European mathematicians took decades to formulate. These convergences suggest that certain logical structures are universal — accessible to any sufficiently developed intelligence, regardless of cultural origin. But they also suggest that we have lost other paths, other ways of arriving at the same truths, that could have enriched our understanding. Japanese wasan approached calculus differently than Newton. What might we have learned if the two traditions had dialogued?

War as accelerator.

The ultimate paradox of this period is that war — this human catastrophe — accelerated the development of thinking machines. Ballistic calculations justified ENIAC. The decryption of Enigma and Lorenz justified Colossus. The urgency of victory forced interdisciplinary collaborations unthinkable in peacetime. Mathematicians, engineers, linguists, and crossword experts worked side by side at Bletchley Park. War also scattered scholars — refugees fleeing Nazism enriched America with what Germany was losing. Computing was born in blood and secrecy. We would do well to remember this.

What Distinguishes: Six Facets of the Same Inferno

If the common threads unite, each continent lived this period in its own way. Six singularities, six irreducible contributions to the history of artificial intelligence.

Africa revealed the invisible threads.

The Ifa system, with its 256 binary configurations, contained the very structure of computing — a byte before the word existed. African fractals, discovered in architecture, textiles, and hairstyles, testified to an intuitive understanding of recursion. Ron Eglash traced the lineage: from Ifa to Arabic geomancy, from geomancy to European alchemists, from alchemists to Leibniz. The thread was never cut — it was simply rendered invisible. Africa reminds us that algorithms have a hidden genealogy, that the fundamental concepts of computing were not born in Europe but reinvented there. The manuscripts of Timbuktu, hidden in attics during colonial occupation, testify to an intellectual resistance that survived everything.

The Americas preserved memories and revealed the forgotten.

The Maya zero, positional notation, and Inca quipus — so many information systems that prefigured our databases. The codices burned by Diego de Landa contained centuries of astronomical observations; the four that survived reveal a precision that still amazes. But the Americas also showed us another form of erasure: that of women. The ENIAC programmers, the Harvard Computers, Grace Hopper — all these pioneers who did the work without receiving credit. The continent where Indigenous memories were burned is also the one where women's memories were made invisible. Double erasure, double task of reconstruction.

Asia demonstrated that parallel paths lead to the same summits.

Seki Takakazu discovered infinitesimal calculus independently of Newton. Nakashima formulated switching circuit theory before Shannon. The Kerala school of mathematics manipulated infinitesimal calculus a century before Europe. Ramanujan, largely self-taught, reached results that Western mathematicians took decades to understand. The Mahalanobis distance, invented in Calcutta in 1930, remains today one of the most used metrics in machine learning. Asia teaches us the universality of mathematical structures — and the price of forced convergence. Wasan was abandoned so Japan could adopt Western mathematics. Indian traditions were marginalized by Macaulay's system. How many alternative paths were closed so that a single way of calculating could prevail?

Europe forged the tools — and consumed the other forges.

Leibniz's binary system. Boole's algebra of logic. Ada Lovelace's first program. Turing's universal machine. Colossus, the first electronic computer. The automata of Vaucanson and Jaquet-Droz. Europe did not merely think about artificial intelligence — it built it. But the European forge was also an inferno. Colonialism destroyed the knowledge systems of other civilizations. Epistemicide accompanied colonization. And the world wars scattered the best minds — refugees from Nazism enriched America with what Europe was losing. Tommy Flowers, who built Colossus, received orders to burn the plans. Konrad Zuse, who built the first programmable computer, worked in isolation and remained unknown. Europe forged the tools of AI on the ashes of the libraries it had burned.

The Middle East bequeathed the words — and lost the institutions.

"Algorithm" comes from al-Khwarizmi. "Algebra" comes from al-Jabr. "Arabic numerals" still carry the memory of a transmission. Every time a computer executes an operation, it performs an algorithm — and invokes, without knowing it, the name of a ninth-century Persian mathematician. But words survive when institutions die. The House of Wisdom was destroyed in 1258. The Nahda tried to make the springs flow again, with Tahtawi, Abduh, and the Bulaq Press. Then colonialism, the Sykes-Picot agreement, and the fragmentation of the Arab world interrupted the momentum. Hassan Kamel Al-Sabbah, a Lebanese genius, had to exile himself to the United States to file his seventy-three patents — in General Electric's name. The Middle East gave the world the fundamental concepts of calculation, and was prevented from continuing what it had begun.

Oceania embodied the two worlds without a bridge.

On one side, humanity's first astronomers — the Aboriginal people who read the sky in negative, finding constellations in the shadow between the stars. The Polynesian compass and its two hundred and twenty memorized stars. The mathematics of kinship systems, of dizzying combinatorial complexity. On the other, the colonial science that produced Rutherford, father of nuclear physics, and Hargrave, aviation pioneer. Two traditions on the same soil — and no bridge between them. The Stolen Generations interrupted the transmission of knowledge at the very moment colonial universities were beginning to shine. Rutherford was knighted with a coat of arms bearing a Maori warrior — an aesthetic symbol, not an epistemic source. Oceania reminds us that coexistence is not dialogue, that two skies can overlook the same territory without ever meeting.

What This Period Teaches Us for the Ethics of AI

This crossing reveals five lessons that previous periods had not formulated with the same urgency.

Epistemicide is a crime — and it continues.

The destruction of knowledge is not an evil of the past. It continues every time an intellectual tradition is marginalized, every time a knowledge system is declared "primitive" or "unscientific," every time a genius must exile himself to exercise his talent. The artificial intelligence we build today bears the traces of this epistemicide. Its data corpora contain Cook's journals, not Tupaia's navigation songs. Its models know Newton and Leibniz, but ignore Seki Takakazu and Jyeshtadeva. Its algorithms bear al-Khwarizmi's name but integrate nothing of the traditions he represented. This bias is not technical — it is historical. And it can be corrected, if we choose.

Invisibilization is structural — and it must be dismantled.

What is recognized as "foundational" depends on who writes the history. The women of Bletchley Park were not forgotten by accident — they were erased because history preferred to tell men's exploits. The Ifa system was not ignored by chance — it was declared "superstition" because recognizing its sophistication would have undermined colonialism. Today still, the contributions of women, colonized peoples, and non-Western traditions remain underrepresented in the history of computing. Recognizing these contributions is not an exercise in generosity — it is a condition for understanding what we are building.

Governance determines trajectory — and we are at a decisive moment.

The Istanbul observatory was destroyed by political decision. Wasan was abandoned by strategic choice. The Stolen Generations were a deliberate policy. These decisions — made by men, for reasons that seemed good to them at the time — had consequences lasting centuries. Today, a few companies and a few nations control most of the capacity in artificial intelligence. The decisions they make — about data used, models developed, applications authorized — will perhaps shape the world for generations. History reminds us that windows close, and that some never reopen. Who governs AI? Who decides what can be researched, published, deployed? These questions are not technical — they are political.

Epistemic diversity is a resource — and we have impoverished it.

Intelligence has never had only one form. Japanese wasan, the Kerala school, and European mathematics arrived at the same results by different paths. Aboriginal astronomy read the sky in negative. The Ifa system encoded information in binary form centuries before Leibniz. Each tradition developed its own intuitions, its own angles of attack. When a tradition disappears, these intuitions disappear with it. Contemporary artificial intelligence inherits from a single tradition — the one that dominated the others. It could enrich itself from the traditions it supplanted, if someone took the trouble to seek them out.

Transmission is fragile — and the concentration of power threatens it.

Aboriginal knowledge, transmitted orally from generation to generation, vanished in a few decades when the Stolen Generations interrupted the chain. Artificial intelligence encodes its knowledge in numerical parameters that can be copied and distributed. But this technical permanence conceals another vulnerability: concentration. A few data centers, a few teams, a few companies hold the keys to this technology. If these structures collapsed, some of this knowledge could disappear as suddenly as the astronomy of the Gawarrgay. Oceania's history warns us: sophistication is not a guarantee of survival.

The Legacy for Artificial Intelligence

The period 1789-1945 bequeathed to us the tools of artificial intelligence — and their blind spots.

From Leibniz, we inherited the binary system. From Boole, the algebra of logic. From Babbage and Lovelace, the concept of the programmable machine. From Turing, the universal machine and the question of machine intelligence. From Shannon and Nakashima, the theory of logic circuits. From Colossus and ENIAC, the first electronic computers. This conceptual chain is direct, documented, taught in every history of computing course.

But we have also inherited what this chain obscured. The invisible threads from Ifa to Leibniz. The parallel paths of Seki and Nakashima. The lost memories of Maya codices and Inca quipus. The forgotten stars of Aboriginal astronomy. The dried springs of the Arab-Islamic tradition. The erased faces of the women of Bletchley Park and the ENIAC programmers. An artificial intelligence aware of its history should recognize not only what was forged, but what was burned.

More profoundly still, we have inherited a concentration of intellectual power. In 1789, the centers of knowledge were multiple — Baghdad had been supplanted by Europe, but Asia, Africa, the Americas, and Oceania possessed their own traditions. In 1945, a single center dominated: the West, and more specifically America enriched by the exile of European scholars. This concentration was not natural — it was the product of colonial violence, world wars, and systematic epistemicide. Contemporary artificial intelligence inherits from this concentration. Its data, its models, its paradigms come from a fraction of humanity. The other fractions — when their knowledge has not been destroyed — still await integration.

Toward the Next Period: 1945 to the Present

The war ends. Colossus is dismantled, its plans burned. ENIAC is presented to the press. European refugees, settled in America, will shape the decades to come. Turing, back in Manchester, dreams of thinking machines. Von Neumann, the Hungarian polymath, designs the architecture that will bear his name.

The period that opens — from 1945 to today — will be one of acceleration. The concepts forged over a century and a half will be embodied in ever more powerful machines. Artificial intelligence will cease to be a philosophical speculation and become an industry, then a force transforming the world.

But this period will also inherit the silences of the previous one. The corpora on which language models will be trained will contain European and American writings, not the oral traditions of Africa or Oceania. The teams developing algorithms will be composed mainly of white men from a few universities. Decisions about what deserves to be preserved, taught, and developed will be made by those who inherited power — not by those who endured it.

The artificial intelligence we will build tomorrow will depend on the stories we choose to tell ourselves about intelligence itself. If we tell ourselves only one story — that of European automata, of Turing and von Neumann, of American laboratories — we will build only one type of intelligence. If we learn to listen to other stories — those of African invisible threads, of lost American memories, of Asian parallel paths, of the European forge and inferno, of dried Middle Eastern springs, of forgotten Oceanian stars — perhaps we can build something else.

The Choice That Belongs to Us

This period bequeaths us a fundamental ethical question: what intelligence do we want to create?

An intelligence that reproduces the biases of those who designed it — or an intelligence that recognizes and corrects those biases? An intelligence that perpetuates the invisibilization of erased contributions — or an intelligence that brings them to light? An intelligence concentrated in a few hands — or an intelligence that is distributed, diverse, polyphonic?

The epistemicide of the past cannot be undone. Burned codices will not return. Extinct languages will not be resurrected. Elders who died without successors took their knowledge with them. But we can choose not to extend this destruction. We can choose to recognize hidden contributions. We can choose to diversify the sources of knowledge. We can choose to build bridges between traditions that never met.

The stars of the Polynesian compass appear in no navigation algorithm. The mathematics of Aboriginal kinship systems inspire no expert system. The Ifa system is mentioned in no history of computing course. These absences are not inevitable — they are choices. And choices can be changed.

The age of revolutions and total war forged the tools of artificial intelligence — and consumed the alternative forges. It bequeaths us a powerful technology and an immense responsibility: that of recognizing what was destroyed for this technology to exist, and choosing whether we want to perpetuate this destruction or repair it.

The inferno is extinguished. The ashes are still warm. What we build on these ashes depends on us.

The journey continues.