Strangely enough, the science they are trusting in is about three hundred years behind the times. If their science conforms with what their senses tell them, they are subscribing to Newtonian views developed during the seventeenth century. This mechanistic science leads us to view humans as machines that respond to internal and external stimuli, each living in a separate corner of a larger machine: the physical universe. Such a view leads us to believe that we are completely separate, self-animating beings. Our bodies house brains, but our thoughts are only side products of our physical machines; consciousness, free will, divine purpose, and Essence are superfluous at best. The mechanistic view has led us to try and predict and control nature rather than harmonize with it. We strive rather than surrender.

16. The blind watchmaker

If there is a one-line explanation of the power of obliquity, it would be: ‘Evolution is smarter than you are.’

Evolutionary models show that complex organisms— well-ordered corporations, well-functioning societies, prosperous economies— could be produced without omniscience, not that, they were produced without omniscience. So planners, business executives and political leaders who have such omniscient knowledge, or believe they do, have no need of obliquity. The rest of us, however, do.

The Thinking Machine - Stephen Witt

Introduction:

“This is the story of how a niche vendor of video game hardware became the most valuable company in the world. It is the story of a stubborn entrepreneur who pushed his radical vision for computing for thirty years, in the process becoming one of the wealthiest men alive. It is the story of a revolution in silicon and the small group of renegade engineers who defied Wall Street to make it happen. And it is the story of the birth of an awesome and terrifying new category of artificial intelligence, whose long-term implications for the human species cannot be known. At the center of this story is a propulsive, mercurial, brilliant, and extraordinarily dedicated man. His name is Jensen Huang, and his thirty-two-year tenure is the longest of any technology CEO in the S&P 500.

Huang is a visionary inventor whose familiarity with the inner workings of electronic circuitry approaches a kind of intimacy. He reasons from first principles about what microchips can do today, then gambles with great conviction on what they will do tomorrow.

Of course, Huang would work hard anyway. It is in his nature. If there is a theme to his life, it is amplification; he has executed on the same simple precepts of diligence, courage, and mastery of fundamentals again and again and again, to greater and greater effect. I was surprised to learn how much of the man he later became was present in the immigrant child arriving unaccompanied by his parents in the United States in 1973 to an environment so unconducive to flourishing that it seems a miracle he survived it. To understand Huang fully, we begin not at Denny’s restaurant, nor in the giant cathedrals of technology he later commissioned, but at this tiny rural school.

Huang did not have a concrete vision of what the future of technology would look like. Some technologists did; for example, Elon Musk began with a vision of himself standing on the surface of Mars, then worked backward to build the technology he would need to get himself there. Huang went in the opposite direction; he started with the capabilities of the circuits sitting in front of him, then projected forward as far as logic would allow. Only there, at the frontier of reason, would he allow himself to take a single step forward into the nebulous realm of vibes.