Biographical reference: Wikipedia
The question posed
Master Ibn Khaldun, you observed that civilisations decline when their elites, settled in comfort and dependence on luxury tools, lose the social cohesion — asabiyya — that had brought them to power. Is generative AI, which assumes an ever-growing share of intellectual tasks, one of those instruments of comfort that herald decline?
You have read my Muqaddima well. The question you raise is precisely the one I would have asked in my own era, had I observed such a phenomenon. Let me be direct: yes, any tool that dispenses effort without transmitting mastery weakens what I call malaka — that stable quality which settles in the soul through the repetition of an act until it has taken its definitive form. Malaka is not knowledge. It is the habitus forged in effort. And it is malaka, not libraries or treasuries, that gives a civilisation its lasting strength.
Observe how dynasties have declined. Not because they had lost their wealth, but because they had lost their rigour, their solidarity, their capacity to act together without need of intermediaries. Asabiyya — that deep cohesion born of shared hardship — erodes in comfort. Your recommendation algorithms create what I would call a false asabiyya: an appearance of community, bubbles of like-minded people, but without shared history, without common ordeal. This is exactly the hollow cohesion that precedes collapse.
What would reassure me, however, is that my method remains pertinent. I always sought the deep social causes of events rather than their surface appearances. If your researchers apply that gaze to the transformations produced by AI — not on the surface, but in the structure of knowledge, bonds and hierarchies — they will see what is truly happening. The problem is not the tool. The problem is always the question of who benefits from it, who depends on it, and who loses their malaka.