Written by: Ross Douthat
Recently, on a snowy day, I picked up the book “The Conquistadors,” Fernando Cervantes’ story of the arrival of Europeans in the New World, and found myself reflecting on the period in the early 1500s when the Americas had been discovered by Europeans, but no one in the European world fully understood what this discovery meant.
At that moment, all sorts of possibilities were open, from the moderate to the eschatological. The “tides” reached by Christopher Columbus could represent a self-sufficient archipelago, the promised gateway to India and China, a hitherto unknown continent, or a realm of myth and supernatural power.
Spain could have gained a modest commercial and geopolitical advantage, found a path to superpower status, or set in motion a sequence of prophesied events that would reunite Christianity, defeat the Muslim enemy, and hasten the return of Jesus Christ.
Explorers who push further can expect to find primitive tribes or Chinese fleets, dragons and dog-headed men and Prester John, or the lost Atlantis and the Fountain of Youth.
And if you lived in Europe, the only way to appreciate all these opportunities was through announcements from adventurers with every incentive to advertise golden opportunities, to better subsidize their travels to unknown lands.
This seems to be roughly where we are with artificial intelligence today.
Anyone taking the temperature of the artificial intelligence industry would have detected a modest cooling of expectations sometime in 2025, a sense that perhaps the trend line toward superintelligence wasn't simply going vertically.
But in early 2026, with the excitement surrounding the latest version of Anthropic's Claude and his accompanying coding agents, we're back in the hype cycle, with the "we're going to be like gods" sentiments and apocalyptic fears emanating from Northern California.
And if you think all this is just hype, if you are certain that the discovery stories are mostly nonsense and what has been discovered is at best a small chain of islands, I would invite you to spend some time on Moltbook, an AI-generated forum where new-model AI agents talk to each other, debate consciousness, invent religions, devise strategies for hiding from humans, and more.
No, it's not Skynet. But it's the latest sign that we're going somewhere strange at a very high speed.
But believing that the New World of AI is real and strange doesn’t help you map out its full geography. Although my job as a columnist is to help readers understand the world, as a non-coder with no tech background living far from the Bay Area, I often find myself in the position of a European in the year 1500 who relies on the testimony of others to understand America.
Unfortunately, everyone I talk to offers conflicting accounts. There are people who predict AI as a revolutionary technology, but ultimately just similar to the internet in its effects – the equivalent, say, of someone telling you that the Indies are a collection of interesting islands, like the Canary Islands or the Azores, just bigger and potentially more profitable.
Then there are those who talk about AI as an epochal change, on the level of the Industrial Revolution – which would be the equivalent of someone in the year 1500 promising that entire continents awaited beyond the initial chain of Caribbean islands, and that not only riches but also empires and superpowers would eventually rise and fall based on initial patterns of exploration, settlement and conquest.
And finally, there are the people with truly utopian and apocalyptic perspectives – the Singularitarians, the AI-destructors, the people who expect us to either merge with our machines or be destroyed by them. Think of them as the equivalent of Ponce de Leon searching for the Fountain of Youth, imagining the New World as a territory where history is fundamentally broken and the purely human age is left behind.
In the case of the Americas, the middle view was correct – the Age of Discovery changed the world completely without changing the foundations of human existence (while also allowing for plenty of bubbles and speculation along the way). But you couldn’t have known that for sure in 1500, and that doesn’t mean a similar judgment will be accurate when it comes to artificial intelligence.
Moreover, it took a long time – decades, even centuries – for the full significance of the discovery of the New World to become clear. Whereas everything that is coming with artificial intelligence is coming much faster than that. And if the decisions made after Columbus’s discovery had consequences – sometimes beneficial, sometimes morally disastrous – so too, the decisions being made now about artificial intelligence may have echoes far into the future.
Unfortunately, I can't tell you exactly what those decisions should be. All I can do is urge you to free some of your mind from all the headlines, from Trump and ICE and Iran and the Epstein files, and pay more attention to the news from our New World.
The author of the article Ross Douthat has been a columnist for The Times since 2009. He is also the host of the Opinion podcast “Interesting Times.” Most recently, he is the author of “Believe: Why Everyone Should Be a Fellow.”
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