What Happens When Some People in a Society Realize That Knowledge Can Make Them Less Necessary?
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Author's Note: On Remembrance, and the Light They Kept In Flanders fields the poppies blow Between the crosses, row on row. — John McCrae, 1915 Every November the poppies return to the lapels of a nation, small red wounds worn over the heart, and at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month we fall silent. The silence is older than most of us. It was born in 1918, when the guns of the Western Front stopped at eleven o'clock in the morning and a generation that had been taught to march discovered, too late for so many, what marching had cost. I write these pages in the days before Remembrance Day, and I cannot separate the subject of this work from the faces in the old photographs: young men from farms and towns and cities, many of whom had barely finished school, who crossed an ocean to stand in mud so that people they would never meet could go on speaking, reading, voting, arguing, and thinking without permission. John McCrae, a Canadian physician, wrote his lines at Ypres after burying a friend. He did not write them so that we would admire the dead. He wrote them so that we would carry something forward. The torch he spoke of was never only a military inheritance. It was the inheritance of a free mind. It is worth remembering, with some precision, what those soldiers were sent to resist. In the Second World War, the men and women who left Canada, Britain, and the other Allied nations faced a regime that had begun its rule, in the spring of 1933, by burning books in the public squares of Berlin and other German cities. Before it murdered millions, it emptied universities of Jewish and dissenting scholars, seized the newspapers, and placed the radio under a ministry whose purpose was to decide what an entire people would be permitted to believe. The fire in those squares was not an accident of war. It was a declaration of method. A government that intends to rule without consent must first control what its citizens are able to know, and the soldiers who died to defeat that government died, among other things, so that no minister would ever again stand between a people and the library. When we bow our heads in November, we honour lives given in defence of a principle that sounds abstract until it is taken away: that knowledge belongs to the many, and that no authority earns the right to ration the mind. At the going down of the sun and in the morning We will remember them. — Laurence Binyon, 1914 To remember them honestly is to ask what we have done with the freedom they paid for. This work begins with a question that has followed me for years, a question about no single government, ideology, faith, or century, but about civilization itself. Why has humanity spent thousands of years struggling to distribute knowledge, when knowledge is so plainly the engine of nearly everything we call progress? For most of recorded history our ancestors travelled by foot, by horse, by cart and carriage, and generations lived and died inside technological limits that seemed as permanent as the seasons. Then, in less than two centuries, we passed from the horse to the automobile, the aircraft, the satellite, the computer, and machines that process information at a scale no earlier age could have pictured. That acceleration did not come from one invention or one genius. It came from the accumulation, preservation, exchange, criticism, and transmission of what human beings had learned, from mathematics carried between civilizations, discoveries written down instead of forgotten, books made cheaper, universities opened wider, and countless individuals building on the work of strangers they would never meet. Human advancement quickened whenever knowledge became easier to copy, to share, to challenge, and to improve. A darker question follows, one that the poppy forces upon anyone who wears it thoughtfully. If the spread of knowledge has been among the great forces of human advancement, why have institutions across history so often worked to restrict it? Why have books been forbidden, libraries destroyed, teachers persecuted, scientific arguments condemned, and whole populations denied schooling? Why have some governments treated independent thought as a threat to national unity, and some religious and political authorities treated a question as an act of disobedience? I do not believe that every authority is hostile to knowledge, nor that every restriction conceals a conspiracy of privilege. Governments carry real duties concerning public safety, privacy, military secrecy, and the prevention of grave harm, and every society needs ways to test claims and answer falsehood. The danger begins when the language of protection hardens into a permanent excuse for withholding intellectual freedom, when public education is treated as a privilege rather than the foundation of citizenship, and when those who decide what the public may know have a private interest in the public never becoming independent enough to question those decisions. There is a difference between protecting people from demonstrable harm and protecting institutions from informed criticism. That difference runs through every page that follows. What I have come to study, above all, is a particular kind of institutional fear: the fear that people who once depended on a specialist, a gatekeeper, an official, or an institution may one day be able to perform some of those functions themselves. Knowledge changes relationships. It changes who can question, who can negotiate, who can build, who can investigate, and who can demand an explanation. The person who can read a contract depends less on the person who interprets it; the person who can reach the scientific literature depends less on the intermediary who summarizes it. Expertise does not vanish in such a world, and it should not, but its relationship to the public changes, and that change is unwelcome to anyone whose authority rested on the public having no alternative. This, I believe, is the hidden subject of a great deal of history. This paper examines how lawmakers and rulers who seek to ban knowledge, from the clay tablets of the first cities to the server halls of our own decade, have so often been banning not what history has shown to be dangerous, but what they feared would challenge them, or would one day make them no longer needed. Two arguments stand at the threshold of this work, and I set them apart here because each will be expanded into a fuller study of its own. They are the reason these pages were written in the season of remembrance. On artificial intelligence and the democratization of the mind. For the first time in the long story told here, the thing being distributed is not a book, a newspaper, or a signal, but a form of thinking assistance itself. A student in a rural town can now ask for patient help with calculus at midnight; a tenant can begin to read the lease that binds her; a small business owner can test a financial plan that once required a consultant he could never afford; an independent researcher can gather the scattered work of many disciplines into a single inquiry. These systems make mistakes, sometimes serious ones, and they demand verification, judgment, and responsible use. Yet their capacity to lower the cost of understanding is historically without precedent. The printing press multiplied the word; artificial intelligence may multiply the reader's power to grasp it. The question that will decide whether this becomes the widest door ever opened to ordinary people or the newest wall built around them is the same question every earlier chapter of history has asked: who will hold the key, at what price, and under whose permission? If advanced intelligence becomes one more privilege reserved for the wealthy, the credentialed, and the powerful, we will have rebuilt an ancient hierarchy out of new machinery. If it is distributed with care, accountability, and genuine public access, it may dissolve barriers that have stood between the many and the mind for five thousand years. On why a ban on superintelligence sounds the same old horn. In October 2025, a public statement signed by many prominent scientists and public figures called for a prohibition on the development of superintelligence until there is broad scientific consensus that it can be done safely and with strong public support, and in September 2026 legislation was introduced in the United States Congress that would forbid such development outright. The fears behind these efforts are sincerely held, and some of them deserve serious answers. But I hear in the language of prohibition a note that history has sounded many times before: the Index of Prohibited Books, the licensing of printing presses, the revoked privilege of the Encyclopédie, the bonfires of 1933. Each was announced as protection; each drew a line around what ordinary human beings would be permitted to reach. A ban on the highest forms of machine intelligence, drawn around a term that has no settled technical definition, risks becoming a new instrument of intellectual segregation, in which the means of amplifying human thought are fenced off from the masses, while states, militaries, and the largest institutions keep their own quiet routes through the fence. The alternative is not recklessness. It is integration: placing the means of cognitive amplification into the hands of the many, under rules that are public, limited in time, answerable to courts and citizens, and shaped by those who must live with them. Civilization has never been made safe by keeping its people small. It has been made safe, imperfectly and at great cost, by making them capable. I am not writing to defend one party or to condemn every institution. Complex societies need laws, experts, and authorities; the question is whether those institutions exist to enlarge the capacities of the population or to keep it dependent upon t
Author: salahi, kaveh dimitri
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7225450444