This is the first edition of History of the Present, a series examining the major forces converging in 2026 — including artificial intelligence, geopolitics, inequality, and democracy.
Our first conversation is with Sree Sreenivasan, the former Chief Digital Officer of New York City, with leadership roles at Columbia University and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
His answer to artificial intelligence is not clean or reassuring.
Yes, he told me, we may be in a bubble.
But that does not mean the technology itself is a bubble.
He pointed to the late 1990s, when trillions of dollars were lost in the dot-com collapse — even as the internet went on to become core infrastructure for modern life.
“Was it a bubble? Yes. Was it devastating? Yes. But was the internet a bubble? No.”
That is not a contradiction.
It is a warning.
Because what matters is not only whether the hype collapses.
It is what survives it — and who is building it.
Sreenivasan’s argument is not only about the technology.
It is about the people directing it — and the incentives shaping their decisions.
He argues that the problem is not necessarily the technology itself, but the humans who are in charge of it — pointing to decision-making patterns seen during the social media era, where harmful tradeoffs were repeatedly made in pursuit of engagement and profit.
This is Sreenivasan’s underlying concern: that similar decision patterns are now shaping artificial intelligence systems at a larger scale.
Artificial intelligence operates across multiple domains at once:
labor markets
energy and water systems
military decision-making
information ecosystems
Which means the consequences emerge across those systems, as well.
