Ugo Micci : 3 November 2025 08:08
Today, many are wondering what impact the spread of Artificial Intelligence will have on our society. Among the most widespread concerns is the loss of millions of jobs and the resulting unprecedented economic crisis.
To fully understand what is happening, however, it’s worth making a historical digression. Millennia ago, humanity underwent a transformation that would forever reshape the course of civilization: the transition from hunter-gatherer societies to agricultural communities. It wasn’t a simple lifestyle shift, but a revolution that freed up the most precious commodity in human existence: time.
Today, as Artificial Intelligence erupts into our lives, we may find ourselves on the brink of a similarly far-reaching transformation: a cognitive revolution whose consequences are as difficult to predict as those of the agricultural revolution were for our Neolithic ancestors.
In his seminal book “Guns, Germs, and Steel,” Jared Diamond showed how the domestication of plants and animals triggered a chain of events that shaped modern society. His thesis, that geography and available resources determined the technological development of certain civilizations, also offers us a valuable lens for understanding the AI revolution.
One aspect of the agricultural revolution that deserves particular attention is the paradox of free time. Contrary to popular belief, early farmers did not work less than hunter-gatherers; in fact, they often worked more. The real innovation was not the quantity of free time, but its quality and distribution. For the first time in history, not everyone had to devote themselves every day to immediate survival.
From that new organization of time, specialization arose: some built, others designed, still others simply began to think. Scribes, artisans, philosophers, administrators were born. In essence, civilization was born.
Artificial intelligence is producing a structurally similar effect. Just as the plow freed humans from the daily search for food, AI is freeing increasing portions of our cognitive time from repetitive, analytical tasks that until recently absorbed hours of human labor.
A lawyer who used to spend days analyzing contracts can now obtain a preliminary analysis in minutes; a programmer can communicate with an assistant who generates code, allowing them to be tens of times more productive; a doctor has tools capable of identifying anomalies with precision that surpasses human limits.
And this is where the first, crucial misunderstanding lies: the AI revolution isn’t about “working less,” but about “working differently.” It’s about opening up new spaces for creativity, intuition, and abstract thought.
The agricultural revolution did not create a society of idlers, but a civilization capable of imagination. The Sumerians used their freed time not to rest, but to invent writing; the Greeks used it to develop philosophy, mathematics, and democracy. Time taken away from survival became time for culture, science, and beauty.
AI can bring a similar liberation, but on a global scale and at exponential speed. When a researcher no longer has to spend months cataloging data, but can focus on interpretation, when an artist can express a vision without mastering complex techniques, when a citizen can understand political issues thanks to tools that synthesize and explain, then entirely new cognitive spaces open up.
Of course, the transition won’t be painless. As Diamond pointed out, the agricultural revolution brought with it inequality, epidemics, and wars. It created hierarchies, exploitation, and conflict. It would be naive to think that AI couldn’t, in turn, create dislocations, injustices, and new concentrations of power.
Fears about technological unemployment, algorithmic surveillance, or the concentration of wealth in a few hands are well-founded. But to stop at these fears would be to commit the same mistake as a hunter-gatherer who, observing the first cultivated fields, saw only toil and disease, without realizing the birth of civilization.
The true benefits of the agricultural revolution were unpredictable to those who experienced it. No Sumerian farmer could have imagined that his wheat fields would, millennia later, lead to the theory of relativity or space exploration. Likewise, it is impossible to predict today where AI will lead us: what forms of thought, disciplines, or social structures will emerge when billions of people have access to powerful cognitive tools.
However, some signs are already visible: students who, freed from rote memorization, develop deeper critical thinking. Researchers who accelerate scientific discoveries by exploring previously inaccessible spaces. Artists who blend tradition and technology into radically new expressive languages.
Even more interesting is what could happen on the political level: citizens who, thanks to AI, understand complex data and participate in debates once reserved for experts. Communities that use artificial intelligence to coordinate, deliberate, and imagine alternative futures. All of this is possible, and can take positive or negative directions.
Just as agriculture made organized politics possible, AI could enable new forms of democratic participation and social coordination.
The European Renaissance was also born from the accumulation of leisure and wealth in a few Italian city-states, but above all from the circulation of ideas and the concentration of talent. AI today offers the possibility of a “distributed Renaissance”: no longer limited to an elite, but potentially accessible to anyone with an internet connection.
Imagine a society where a thinker in Nigeria has the same tools as a Harvard professor, where a student in India collaborates in real time with researchers from around the world, where language barriers dissolve and human beings can increasingly focus on what they do best: creating, imagining, empathizing, and making sense.
Recognizing the positive potential of AI doesn’t mean giving in to naive optimism. The agricultural revolution took millennia to unfold its fruits, and along the way it caused immense suffering. We must learn from that history: ensure that the benefits of AI are equitably distributed, protect those who will be penalized, prevent abuse, and keep the human at the center.
But it would be equally shortsighted, even dangerous, to adopt a purely defensive posture. Major technological transitions are unstoppable. The crucial question is not whether AI will transform society, but how we want it to do so.
Looking back at the agricultural revolution today, we see that, despite its costs, it made possible everything we call civilization: Mozart’s music, modern medicine, human rights, space exploration. None of this would have existed in a hunter-gatherer society.
Artificial intelligence could represent a similarly significant breakthrough. We can’t predict where it will lead us, but we can recognize the signs of an epochal shift: the freeing up of cognitive time, the emerging new forms of thought, the possibilities for collaboration and creation on a global scale. Everything suggests we are on the cusp of something extraordinary.
Perhaps, in a hundred or a thousand years, our descendants will look back on this moment as we look back on the agricultural revolution: as a difficult but necessary transition that made new forms of existence and human progress possible. And if this is true, our task is not to resist change, but to guide it with wisdom, courage, and a clear vision of the humanity we aspire to become.
The time freed from machines, if we are able to rise to the challenge, could become the time in which we learn to be more fully human.
Ugo Micci