Facts Will not Save You

AI, history, and Soviet sci-fi

A few days ago Microsoft published a list of the 40 jobs most likely to be replaced by AI. The first two entries are translators and historians, which made me laugh. The two jobs have one thing in common — they are acts of interpretation that are never recognized as such by outsiders. It’s probably self-evident in the tech world that history is a matter of assembling facts. A kind of mechanical curation, like sweeping loose pebbles into neat piles. This delusion is part of a larger hubris— the belief that facts can be wrenched from their social context and made shinier, more objective in the process.

But as Goethe said, every fact is already a theory. That’s why facts cannot save you. “Data” will not save you. There can be no objective story since the very act of assembling facts requires implicit beliefs about what should be emphasized and what should be left out. History is therefore a constant act of reinterpretation and triangulation, which is something that LLMs, as linguistic av…