“It appeared in the same decade that Columbus discovered

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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the first railroads) and even that key metric of modern geo-economics, the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which is an outdated metric dreamed up in the Great Depression that AI will almost certainly kill.

America and Vasco da Gama discovered a sea route to India, at a time when mathematics was taught as astrology in the universities of Europe, and witches were burned at the stake. And 500 years hong kong whatsapp number data later [Pacioli’s] bookkeeping treatise remains the foundation of modern accounting and its system is still in use throughout the world,” wrote historian Jane Gleeson-White in Double Entry – How the Merchants of Venice Created Modern Finance. She concluded, “This is extraordinary.”

I agree. And we’re about to see a “source code” similarly obscure just two years ago, the “Language Language Model”, remake the world along with other tools of AI and those of synthetic biology. It will be even more vastly profound than that launched by those geniuses of Venice half a millenia ago.

Now I don’t want to repeat the examples of AI’s inspiration to individual creativity that I explored in Part One. But I can’t neglect the contribution at the TED conference of Singapore AI artist Lim Wenhui, who shared the surreal visual celebration of the eleven aunts who help raised her – the “Auntieverse”. Her visual perspective imagines virtual aunties who shun societal norms, make sushi on the moon, clean up the vast patch of marine debris in the Pacific Ocean, and do so much more. Her work defies adequate description but summons the eclectic genius of Salvador Dalí or Maurits Cornelis Escher onto digital canvas: “I could not have imagined creating this without AI,” Wenhui told us. And, in fact if not for AI, it would have taken nearly a lifetime to create such a portfolio of art.

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I should also mention the TED presentation by Willie Williams. Williams is a legend in the live music industry as the stage and lighting director for the past 40 years for the Irish rock band U2 (one of my favorites). He spoke about the concert with which the iconic band opened “The Sphere” in Las Vegas. This incredible $2.2 billion immersive venue includes the world’s largest LED screen and a suite of AI robotics technologies. As an artist, Williams compared the invention of perspective, the illusion of depth born of that original Renaissance, with the new horizons that visual and musical artists are exploring today with AR, or artificial reality. The goal of “awe and wonder, placed under control of the artist is unchanged over the centuries”, he said.., “but today we have the most powerful tools ever to do this.”