Historian Compares the Rise of AI to the Fall of Rome: 'This Feels Stranger Than Heaven'
As Silicon Valley races toward artificial general intelligence, history professor Dr. Elena Vance draws an eerie parallel: the moment is *stranger than heaven*—a phrase she uses to capture the disorienting, twilight feel of watching an empire self-destruct while claiming to build utopia. "Rome didn't collapse because of barbarians at the gate," she says. "It collapsed because the elite lost touch with reality. Today's tech billionaires are promising paradise, but the data shows they are replicating the same blind hubris that fell the Senate. It's a pattern stranger than heaven—and history is warning us we are repeating the fall of Rome, not the founding of a new one."