Wisdom

The markets we participate in are intensely gardened. The people doing the gardening have names. It is a set of choices that people with names and addresses and human souls in the process of making. The Citrini piece is written as if the gardeners do not exist — as if the spiral arrives, as if unemployment happens, as if the daisy chain unravels... See more

The fear of mass job displacement is real, but it rests on a flawed premise — that what we currently sit atop are radical, infallible systems of pure market competition. Capitalism has never actually been this. Global markets are, at most, a few hundred people coordinating with each other to make difficult trade-offs, organizing trillions in... See more

Almost all of the language model discourse in recent days has imagined AI like French gardeners — or rather like viruses from outer space, inflicting themselves on society with no concern for what came before. It pretends we have no immune system to radical societal change.

I'm writing about gardens today because I work in technology, and technology is almost exclusively in the business of building new Versailles.

The pattern is so consistent it is almost impossible to see until you write it all out. A new system arrives. It surveys the landscape of whatever came before — the existing tools, the inherited... See more

This is Le Nôtre with English aesthetics. The geometry is naturalistic rather than formal, but the method is French: impose a vision on the land by eliminating what's already there. The curves are designed on paper. The wild areas are planted to specification. The meadows are manufactured. The whole thing is a representation of nature — an... See more

The story is that Brown would arrive at an estate and spend months walking the grounds with the owner, studying the contours of the land, the fall of light across a hillside, the path of an existing stream, the position of mature trees that had been growing for centuries before anyone thought to design around them, and pronounce after much... See more

You could draw Versailles on paper and execute it to specification without ever visiting the site. In fact, I hear many billionaires across the gulf have done so, and this is essentially what Le Nôtre did. The plan precedes the place. The geometry is imposed on the land. The land's existing contours — its hills, its drainage, its mature trees —... See more

If you asked me what the function of humans is after AGI, It is to handle the transcendent with this same fine disregard for the rules. To look at what is great and what serves us, to play with it, to riff on it, to hold it loosely, and to orient towards it in a way that lets us co-create with it.

Christ was a carpenter before he was a teacher.... See more