December 23, 2024
The following are the same people, separated chronologically: {16th/17th c. Renaissance men/Enlightenment thinkers, 19th/20th c. science fiction writers/inventors/academics, 21st c. blog writers/founders/technology philanthropists}1. Their common traits: polymathic and future-looking curiosity, articulating visions of tomorrow, and (often) patronage or wealth independent of vocation.2
(1) Polymathy and futurism come together. This is because polymaths understand the world deeply among several dimensions, so extrapolating into the future follows naturally, and imagining the future requires understanding the interdisciplinary forces that shape world systems. Da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa, studied human anatomy, and designed a “flying machine” centuries before planes. Ben Franklin signed the Declaration of Independence, caught lightning, and discussed “the power of man over matter” in 1000 years. And in pursuit of understanding civilizational trajectories, modern technologists share a grab bag of other intellectual influences, particularly cognitive science, anthropology, economics, and history.3
I call people of this mold techno-polymaths. Historically academia was the pinnacle of intellectual freedom in this flavor, housing thinkers like John von Neumann and Richard Feynman. Now the ivory tower is increasingly siloed, its disciplines getting deeper but narrower. So it seems like most of them have turned to creating and/or writing about technology.
(2) Progress – the articulation and realization of better visions ƒor tomorrow – is a relatively new idea. The Greeks saw history as cyclical, and the Romans viewed history as static (culminating in their empire, urbs aeterna); the concept of continually improving humanity’s condition comes from the Enlightenment, starting with the works of Francis Bacon. Only post-industrialization has technology (rather than say, religion or moral philosophy) become arguably the most powerful lever of progress.
More modern is the globalized world, the compression of technological timescales, and the relative capital efficiency of (technological) change. Much of this can be attributed to widespread personal computing and Internet connectivity – i.e., technological progress happening mostly in the digital world – but seems like it will soon come true for the physical world, too4. This leads to the democratization of civilizational impact, and the consciousness that compelling visions of the future can be realized through the actions of ~individuals, mostly through technology. This sense of agency over progress5 is relatively new. Building the future has never been more accessible, so technology has become a dominant medium for imagination. Why settle for writing science fiction, when you can actually bring that universe to life?
(3) Another reason why today’s people interested in humanity’s future work in technology is, of course, financial. It takes capital to build, and it takes capital to create the “intellectual leisure class” of techno-polymaths. Money from tech’s massive margins and meteoric growth has led to crops of wealthy founders/investors, and (directly or indirectly) patronage of interesting intellectuals.^[6] This writing started with the observation that some investors invest to capture entrepreneurial value and place smart bets on emerging trends, and others invest to bring a certain future to life (i.e. a16z’s American Dynamism thesis). If the latter are history’s sci-fi writers and inventors, the former are more like history’s bankers and railroad financiers. But I think these investors realize their “Renaissance man” statuses wearing the hat of a philanthropist, rather than a venture capitalist6. Deploying capital is a means of advancing an active thesis based on a vision for the world, with returns only a secondary consideration: see Elon Musk (SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink, …), Peter Thiel (Thiel Fellowship), Nat Friedman (AI Grant, Vesuvius Challenge, PlasticList), and the Collisons (YIMBY, Stripe Press, Arc Institute), etc.7
Some unresolved questions:
Somehow variants of the essay have persisted through all of this. Also, salons : conventions : Twitter/LessWrong (community focal points) and nobility : academia : philanthropists (patronage). ↩
beyond this narrower definition, there exists a growing “intellectual leisure class” that can also read broadly and articulate the future. I think today it consists of: academics, swaths of knowledge workers, arguably anyone sufficiently curious that has Internet access ↩
Maybe this can be summarized as “ideas relevant to progress and power”. ↩
Despite the whole “we wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters” thing, I don’t think it’s wholly bad that we’ve seen ~30 years of progress happening ~only on computers; maybe building out the digital world was just a prerequisite for the 3D printing, synthetic biology, and AGI-trained-on-the-whole-Internet that will shape the physical world’s future. In general technological growth is a flywheel and previous progress enables even grander visions. ↩
A (probably overused) Steve Jobs quote that I like: “Everything around you that you call ‘life’ was made up by people who were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use”. Or from Paul Graham: “Live in the future, then build what’s missing.” ↩
thanks Christina for the discussion ↩
arguments can be made for the inclusion of effective altruist leaders/grantmakers on this list, which is really just the convergence of capital + world knowledge + understanding of the levers of progress ↩