Yes, this is how voices work.
> Whatever people were thinking 90 years ago, it had already lost its influence by the time of AI's societal debut in the 1980s and is totally irrelevant to AI's impact today.
Are you making this argument simply based on the passage of time? I can think of a lot of ideas whose longevity makes 90 years seem a sneeze.
> While both may share a mindset, linking Mead to today's techno-bros is a bit of a stretch.
If they share a mindset, would that not be an obvious link? Additionally, this article is drawing a connection not just between Mead and techno-optimists (not the same as tech-bros), but between Mead and both techno-optimism and existential risk. That's sort of what the article's preamble describes as the interesting thing.
Plato was famous, but only one of the many voices in very long debate. Whatever people were thinking 2000+ years ago, it had already lost its influence by the time of AI's societal debut in the 1980s and is totally irrelevant to AI's impact today. While both may share a mindset, linking Plato to today's techno-bros is a bit of a stretch.
The allegory of the cave still has resonance today. Abstract ideas are timeless. That's the point of abstraction.
Historians who study the origins of idea traces them back and make connections to thoughts and ideas of the past. Often, the inheritors of those ideas knows nothing of how they get them and think themselves clever for coming up with them all by themselves.
Remove Margaret Mead from the timeline and the AI camps today would probably be the exact same. Those are basically the two options with anything in life that's both useful and dangerous: optimism or pessimism, hope or fear.
https://www.wearethemighty.com/popular/world-war-i-battlefie...
The debut would seem to be at least 1968, with HAL9000's starring role in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
(If you watch it now, you will see that Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick made a film that is right on-target today. Even the most prominent feature of their 1968 fictional AI is its polite, conversational, very human output and input - and some very bad analysis.)