THE LONG VIEW

What if the most transformative technologies don’t change the world because of their technical brilliance, but because of the stories we tell about them? In 1945, the atomic bomb was not just a weapon—it became a symbol of existential power, reshaping geopolitics, research funding, and public imagination for decades. Today, AI is undergoing a similar mythmaking: cast as both savior and threat, locked in a ‘race’ with China that justifies secrecy, surveillance, and speed at all costs. But history shows that these narratives are not inevitable—they are constructed. During the Crypto Wars, the U.S. government claimed that strong encryption would empower terrorists, yet when the restrictions lifted, the result was not chaos, but the secure digital economy we rely on today [Electronic Frontier Foundation, 2004]. Similarly, the ‘missile gap’ of the 1950s was largely fictional, yet it drove massive defense spending and shaped presidential elections. The current AI ‘race’ may be following the same script: a narrative powerful enough to reshape institutions, even if the underlying reality is more nuanced. The real question isn’t whether the U.S. will ‘win’—but whether we’ll recognize, too late, what we’ve sacrificed in the name of winning. —Marcus Ashworth