The ‘Source Code’ of the Renaissance

[jrineakter]

“We can’t control what we don’t understand,” Suleyman said, sharing his effort to explain AI to his 6-year-old nephew. “And so the metaphors, the mental models, the names, these all matter.” He then went on to offer his own new metaphor. What is coming, he said, is a new partner who will accompany humanity on its onward journey, nothing less than “a new digital species”.

For now, I’ll let Suleyman’s metaphor sink in, one more step in the conceptual scaffolding we’re all struggling to create in this new age. “Once metaphor has us in its grasp, it never lets us go,” warned James Geary, author of I Is An Other – The Secret Life of Metaphor. Think of the way they illuminate our understanding of reality. “Life as a journey.” Or, “time as money.” Or, “food for thought.” We all have a “light of my life” – or we do if we’re lucky.

Suleyman’s choice is a striking analogy to be sure, but if you have any doubts, watch LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman’s just-released short video chatting with his “digital twin” about everything from the six books Hoffman has authored to the issues of ethics around creating digital mirrors of ourselves. Surely discomforting to some at first glance, the advent of digital copies of ourselves – trained in his case on years of writing and recorded speeches – makes us more human, not less. He argues: “It adds to the range of capabilities of things that I could do.” Hoffman’s experiment is radical innovation today; in a year or two it will be commonplace. If you harbor any lingering doubts, take a look at this brief demo from Austin-based Portalis.ai (in full disclosure, Debra and I are proud investors) with interactive AI-powered chatbot characters. As one helps a young student studying cellular biology, another offers a student a reading list including Aldous Huxley and George Orwell, while yet another agent advises a parent on best ways to handle a toddler tantrum.

Back at TED, AI game developer Kylan Gibbs shared the ways AI agents and game avatars are not just interacting with us, but increasingly interacting with one another, and with the environment to create immersive experiences and games that will, for example, reward conflict resolution rather than battle. Gibbs said, “As amazed as I am by all these task-focused applications that are coming out, the more I work with studios and creatives, the more excited I am for the potential of these agents to extend human creative potential.”


While you’re mulling Suleyman’s new “species” analogy and a few examples of its ilk, I’ll introduce a different kind of metaphor. For I truly believe that our current age of technology and innovation profoundly mirrors the era wrought by what historians often call the “Silicon Valley of the Middle Ages”, the city-state of Venice. While we now remember Venice, and its fellow city-states of Milan and Florence, for famed art and sculpture, we too often neglect the “source code” of the Renaissance. For it was the output of workshops and intellectual salons of Venice that produced the innovations in navigation and productivity, and refined the calculative tools of Hindu-Arabic numerals (imagine the difficulty of long division in Roman numerals). This earlier Silicon Valley brazil whatsapp number data also laid the financial foundations of modern capitalism, which replaced serfdom, an economic order that bound roughly half the population of Europe and Russia in economic bondage. In the humanist Enlightenment that grew from that Renaissance, we find the origins of the nation-state, even our own democracy, and the contours of our Constitution. I’m sure the creatives of that age had their skeptics, but one wonders how long the brutality of feudalism would have endured had the Medicis of Florence or the Doge of Venice been convinced to call a moratorium on Da Vinci and Michelangelo.

I realize, of course, that a term like “double-entry bookkeeping” may not set the heart racing. But its invention in 1494 set the stage not just for this explosion of commerce that financed the art, culture, and literature that defines the Renaissance in our modern imaginations. This seemingly modest innovation from a monk named Luca Pacioli – greatly accelerated by the invention of the printing press just decades before – also created the financial architecture enabling modern manufacturing (cost accounting and Wedgwood pottery), transportation (long-term debt financing, depreciation, and the first railroads) and even that key metric of modern geo-economics, the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which is an outdated metric dreamed up in the Great Depression that AI will almost certainly kill.