If you haven’t read ‘A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court’ by Mark Twain, I highly recommend it. Though written 136 years ago, it’s remarkably relevant to the AI era.
Shubhranshu Singh a marketer and columnist.
Set in the late 19th century in America of the Gilded Age of railroads and industrial empires, the novel follows Hank Morgan, a skilled American engineer who’s transported back to King Arthur’s medieval court. Armed with modern knowledge, Hank attempts to introduce electricity, mass production, and communication systems to speed up societal progress.
But instead of creating a utopia, his efforts clash with entrenched social structures.
The result?
Surveillance, civil war, and destruction. What begins as an optimistic transformation ends in chaos.
Twain’s novel critiques both the romanticisation of the past and blind faith in technology. It’s a sharp satire about how advanced tools alone can’t change systems built on hierarchy, myth, and power. It also explores a timeless tension: What happens when transformative technology meets unyielding culture?
Fast forward to today. AI is our version of Hank Morgan’s electricity. It is powerful, transformative, and full of promise. It may optimise healthcare, design, education, and climate modelling. But in the wrong hands, it could amplify inequality, deepen surveillance, and spread misinformation.
Will AI be humanity’s greatest invention or its final folly?
Just because we can build something, should we?
In Twain’s telling, his enthusiastic engineer tries to replace superstition with science overnight. Naturally, he fails. Because transforming a society takes more than data or code. It takes empathy, context, and humility. Algorithms can’t override centuries of culture or human behaviour.
AI today is racing ahead, supercharged with expectation. But the friction is starting to show. Businesses are questioning their viability, and societies are grappling with their fit and consequences.
Hank tries to democratize Arthur’s kingdom with newspapers and education, but he overlooks the need for social context and cultural acceptance. That backfires, too. Tech without trust fails.
Every organisation has its own King Arthur and his court—comfortable in inertia, cocooned in entitlement, out of touch with how people live. These are the leaders who resist disruption, not because they can’t understand it, but because it threatens their position.
AI may empower users, but it can also reinforce existing biases. Without inclusive design and equity, even revolutionary tools can harm more than they help.
In Twain’s world, knowledge alone wasn’t enough. Hank believed in reason, logic, and future-proofing. But the elites of the older order dismissed him. Change, when embodied in a single person or team, can be ignored.
Today, AI builders and big tech platforms hold immense power. But without democratic oversight and social alignment, they risk becoming modern-day Hanks who are brilliant, well-meaning, but blind to the forces they’re up against.
Twain wasn’t anti-technology. He was anti-hubris.
His novel warns us not to believe that code can conquer culture or that innovation alone can fix human systems. Progress isn’t inevitable. It requires leadership, buy-in, and wisdom.
The real challenge isn’t what the tech can do. It is what we do with it. Do we understand the systems we aim to disrupt? Are we ready for what we unleash?
Let me end with a quote from the novel:
“The reign of aristocracy had passed; its glory was dead. There was no place for it in the society of the future…
You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.”
That, more than ever, is the lesson. It’s not just about tools. It’s about focus, imagination, and what kind of future we’re trying to build.
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