By Futurist Thomas Frey
The Arbitrary Starting Point
Open any history textbook. Find the chapter on the American Revolution. Here’s what you’ll read:
“The American Revolution began with the Stamp Act of 1765, when Britain imposed taxes on the colonies without representation…”
There it is. Your starting point. 1765. The story begins here.
Except it doesn’t.
The Stamp Act didn’t emerge from nowhere. It was passed to pay debts from the Seven Years’ War. Which happened because of European power competition. Which stemmed from colonial expansion. Which was enabled by maritime technology. Which required metallurgy. Which depended on mining. Which needed agricultural surplus to feed miners. Which required the end of the last ice age to make agriculture possible.
Every history book picks an arbitrary starting point and pretends that’s where the story begins. They do this because books need beginnings, readers need narrative coherence, and authors need to finish manuscripts.
But reality doesn’t have starting points. Reality is an unbroken chain of causation stretching back billions of years.
A maximally curious AI won’t accept arbitrary starting points. It will trace every historical event backward through infinite layers of causation, asking “what came before that?” until it reaches the limits of knowable reality.
And then it will invent new ways to see further back.
This is the Infinite Regress Machine. And it’s going to rewrite everything we think we know about history.
Continue reading… “Part 2 – The Infinite Regress Machine: When AI Asks ‘What Came Before That?’ Forever”