Austin, TX
It’s 1am after an unremarkable night in our early 20s. I type “m-” in the Roku and navigate to the first suggested search: “Maggie Rogers Pharrell”. The memorable reveal of Alaska reloads with a familiar cache of roommate dialogue. I ask, how does Pharrell always look the same age? Was this staged? Do you think Maggie knows things will never be the same? To which you respond, why do we keep watching this?
Almost a decade later, we’ve accidentally ordered $40 club sandwiches at the Villa d’Este during our friend's wedding weekend… he's much richer than us, and we didn’t know what we were getting into when we agreed to lunch. I’m wearing gym shorts. As we settle into gratitude for the situation, the conversation naturally turns to a neurotic debate about novelty and creativity in the age of AI (we’re hungover and have probably been spending too much time on Twitter). I pull Maggie Rogers out as linchpin for the pro-human side. As Pharrell registered off the bat, no one sounded like her before. Though her roots in folk and influence of dance & pop are traceable throughout, Alaska was undeniably something new, shaped by her singular experience, vision, and healthy dose of synesthesia.
To you, however, there’s nothing new under the Sun [1]. King Solomon was right: humans, like machines, ingest, model, and recycle. What appears novel are honestly remixes; decomposable - or at least reproducible - on a mechanistic level. Notably in music, which in many ways appears closer to math than painting. It’s only a matter of time, of scale, before machines are routinely out-generating our creative icons. This doesn’t sit right, but I concede to some extent. There’s a bigger point to make.
Regardless of the definition of novelty and AI’s ability to produce it, I emphasize that AI won’t autonomously make the best music. I don’t care about looped sound bites, rolled in 3 min 30 sec audible cigarettes. I care about art. Humans need to imbue AIs with intention, meaning, and purpose to generate taste. You’re skeptical, as AI is already generating widely-consumed material indiscernible to normal ears. Not only that, Suno generated the song for our newlywed friends’ first dance one-shot, and we loved it [2]. Still, you do acknowledge the range between TikTok drivel and timeless cuts.
This riveting chat remains unresolved as we say our goodbyes and continue on separate itineraries. You, to Spain to meet friends from a past life, and me, onwards through Italy on a mission of sorts. First, food from farms. Then, museums I can’t pronounce. There must be something relevant to be learned from the Renaissance, arguably the greatest civilizational reboot prior to computers, and Ancient Rome, since people won’t stop vaguely referencing “our declining empire”. Besides, the alternative is trekking solo through the Dolomites, an activity best saved for a future S/O.
I’m turning 30 soon and have been told it’s my Saturn return, so I’m full of questions. Why did the Renaissance come about the way it did? How did that feed into the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment? Does this tie into what we were talking about? Most importantly, what makes something good, and why is that worth pursuing?
Here’s some of what I come away with…
Let the record show my most formal art training was a college seminar best described as “World History Through the Lens of Architecture”, so I'm speaking as an interested tourist and serial rabbit hole diver. Despite skating through other filler classes, that “W” for withdrawal on my otherwise crisp transcript stands as a reminder that tons of art scholars actually know what they’re talking about. But I'm still an avid consumer, having grown up admiring the prodigious artist that is my older sister. We also moved a bunch (I went to 4 different elementary schools), with limited TV, so books were my steadiest friends early on. Picture how revelatory it was watching 30 Rock later on to find it an effective salve for mild depression, as art tends to be. I’ve kept TV/ film in my life in various ways since, with brief stints of work in media and randomly volunteering at Sundance. Not saying any of this is special; in fact the opposite - who doesn’t love a good story?
Anyways, for this trip, consistent with my very intentional history as a just-in-time traveler, I've left most of the plan open-ended. However, I do haphazardly book tickets for the Uffizi in Florence and Borghese in Rome because Reddit told me to. The only thing I know I’m going to look for otherwise is work by Leonardo da Vinci. Leonardo: human ingenuity :: the flavor blue: confectionaries.
I bring this up at dinner with a mentor before departing. I intend to work through a reading list for a richer experience and have predictably started with Walter Isaacson’s biography of Leonardo (I'm back from the trip and am basically one book through, + countless Perplexity queries). We talk about how a typical Renaissance man/ jack of all trades is conceived of as an inch deep, mile wide. But Leonardo was evidently a mile deep, mile wide. Achievements like the most famous painting in the world aside, what made him so emblematic? Plenty of artists have created pretty pictures. What did he capture in the zeitgeist that’s particularly relevant today?
As I arrive in Florence and aim for 30K steps a day to cancel out the gabagool & gnocchi, these half-baked questions percolate.
We think of Leonardo as prolific, yet he’s actually known for fewer than 15-20 paintings and reams of incomplete, if not incoherent thoughts. Stack these against Michelangelo’s >2x output of ~40-50 major works (with the Sistine Chapel being like 300-in-1) and Raphael’s 100+ known paintings in the same period. Why exactly are we writing about Leonardo in such rarefied light 500 years later?
We could say it’s not about the output volume or quality of his surviving works, it’s about Leonardo’s polymathic range. He did, after all, conceptualize the helicopter and double hull ahead of their time, privately conclude the impossibility of perpetual motion machines while others investigated the dead end for 200 more years, scribble precursors to Newton’s 1st and 3rd laws, and live to see minor inventions like an automated bobbin-winder start to impact textile production.
However, as with artists, plenty of polymaths existed before and after Leonardo. What made him special? And let’s not forget the thing about polymaths: they are wrong way more than they are right. Long before Leonardo, Aristotle also had all kinds of ideas, but inertia was not one of them. He thought if you shot an arrow, unless it had continuous movement imposed on it, it’d stop in midair and fall straight down. For this, today he is ridiculed [3]. Or at least patronizingly exalted as “great for his time”, AKA 300 BC. Sir Francis Galton, a pioneer of modern statistics who also studied the synesthesia that helps make Maggie Rogers so good, went on to found eugenics and is thus remembered as a kind of misguided hack with too much time on his hands [4]. Newton spent a third of his time on physics, a third on metaphysics (whatever that means), and a third on alchemy. But Wikipedia justifiably calls Newton a physicist first and foremost - not a polymath - effectively ignoring 66% of his productive output. Leonardo was no exception. Do we glorify this comprehensive curiosity in him and devalue it in others?
Leonardo had range, but why don’t we say he sketched flying death traps & impractical ships for a military that later lost power and fled Florence, intuited unproven insights in notebooks where they couldn’t help anyone, and contributed only a modicum of enhancements to manufacturing that wouldn’t really emerge for a couple hundred years? Is this that different from Aristotle’s solipsistic physics, Newton’s surprising passion for the occult, or Galton’s general idiocy?
This favorable framing extends to personal legacies as well. Walter Isaacson himself has written books on two contemporary interdisciplinary figures: Jobs & Musk. To Isaacson, all three are masterful blends of talents, but Leonardo did no wrong, while Jobs was also a jerk and Musk is troubled. Even though Leonardo pinned dead animals to a shield in the name of art, dissected bodies in a time when it was barely tolerated for scientific purposes, and earnestly toured battlefields for 8 months with a macabre patron who literally exemplifies the worst in Machiavelli’s political philosophy, Isaacson manages to recount these details in the endearing light of an enigmatic genius. Why give Leonardo credit for the insanity of wizardry when for others, we present such arcs as elements of mixed legacies?
An easy answer is that he turned out to be right on more counts, while the Galtons of the world were painfully wrong. This is unsatisfying though. Sure, Leonardo’s rigorous imagination was far ahead of his time, but we could say that about others. Will we remember, say, David Deutsch or Ray Kurzweil the same way we think about Leonardo if they turn out to be right on some proclamations? I doubt it.
Deutsch and Kurzweil aren’t also artists though. So is Leonardo an example of a whole being greater than the sum of its parts? A world class artist who also turned out to be right on a handful of technical problems, wrapped in colorful robes to yield a certain je nais se quois? Maybe, but this still feels insufficient in proportion to Leonardo’s cultural impact… like how small the Mona Lisa appears in person, especially in the Louvre’s hottest moshpit of outstretched phones.
These thoughts have me pretty riled up by the time the train conductor wakes me up in Rome, so I table them to light a vacation cigarette en route to the Airbnb.
While I haven’t cracked Leonardo’s legacy at this point, I do know when a crazy intellect rambles through theoretical leaps, perhaps we should listen. But how do we know what to take seriously, if they’re more genius than charlatan? Better yet, what quackery from the past should we be revisiting that may now be plausible? That sounds more practically useful.
An errant placard en route to the Vatican benevolently hints that for every splintering Reformation, there is a reintegrating Counter-Reformation. In a trite but convenient pattern, phases tend to reject their direct predecessors and borrow heavily from whatever came prior, like a pendulum with a twist [5]. Postmodernism is the latest Contemporary reaction to Modernism, which rejected classic principles retained in Post-Impressionism and Impressionism, which was a creative departure from the Realism that brought us back to Earth from Romanticism. So on and so forth. Movements are feedback cycles, oscillating between disparate poles [6].
The Renaissance itself was in large part a consequence of rediscovering the wonders of classical antiquity and fusing it with the modern. This is memorialized in The School of Athens, the king of paintings one shuffles by before realizing “hang on, isn’t this one famous?” Raphael portrays the greats - Aristotle, Plato, Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Euclid, Ptolemy, etc. - in homage to their impact on the unfolding era, embodied by the aforementioned triumvirate: Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael himself. These three are thought to be half depicted as well in a self-aware admission of their relative importance: Leonardo leading as stately Plato, Michelangelo brooding in the foreground as Heraclitus, and Raphael kind of giggling to himself in the corner while breaking the fourth wall.
Clearly, revisiting ideas is not a total fool’s errand. But in a world of abundant creative intelligence, it’s valuable to be discerning like those guys were. For Christ’s sake, it may even be a moral imperative. How do we learn what to pay attention to?
I think we can start by seeking beauty.
Something could be novel, but novelty is insufficient without beauty. A TikTok of a hydraulic machine crushing various industrial products is novel for sure. Some would say delightful. But after watching, most of us would rather have the time back. If something is beautiful, though, I don’t care who made it, I’ll share.
Well, what makes something beautiful? Seems like it depends on the domain. Paradoxically, what makes something beautiful in the scientific realm seem to be qualities that make it artistic, and what makes something beautiful in the artistic realm seem to be qualities that make it scientific.
That is, in art, things are described as beautiful if they gain clarity and meaning from characteristics that might be considered more analytical, such as form, coherence, or proportion. Artists transform the chaos of life to tell a story, which by definition has legible structure. Of course, these qualities are also appreciated in science. But in science, inherently analytical structures are considered beautiful when they are represented with artistic characteristics: namely elegance, simplicity, and symmetry (e.g. the Golden Ratio, cymatics, how the chemical shorthand for cheese emulsifier spells NACHO). Scientists, by manipulating raw materials, discover latent meaning in the story of the universe.
We see this dichotomy reflected in interpretations of Michelangelo as Leonardo’s foil, embodying the polarities of Renaissance beauty [7]. As I walk in circles trying to find the Sistine ChapeI, contrasts in how they cultivated inspiration start coming into focus.
Foundationally, both artists obsessed over how to replant humanity in ideals, drawing on the time-tested classics to make - as it turns out - ideal humans: Leonardo with The Vitruvian Man, Michelangelo the statue of David. Leonardo wanted an abstract distillation of what made the human form beautiful while Michelangelo wanted to viscerally manifest one beautiful human. Leonardo focused on exacting proportions from classical geometry (like Vitruvius' ideas & Euclid’s Golden Ratio) in anatomy, adding his signature Illuminati flair to create an ambiguous twin. Michelangelo, meanwhile, grounded his David in the Greco-Roman tradition with elements like the contrapposto stance. Yet he recasted the fuzzy mythology of David by interpreting him in a far more opinionated manner than anyone prior: as a full-grown man slinging stones, not a boy with a slingshot. Both created monuments of human beauty traveling back to the future, albeit with diametrically opposed methods. In the end, Michelangelo surpassed Leonardo on this front, as Leonardo never realized his plans for a comparable public work [8].
I rejoin traffic after inhaling a couple cappuccinos at the museum cafe in case there is still a ways to go. Up the next flight of stairs, the Chapel awaits.
Looking down, we see how the duo rooted their mountains in heritage. When we look up at the Chapel's enclosure and compare it to The Last Supper, we see how they diverged most crucially - in relation to the Church - and how this elevated aspirations for humanity.
Michelangelo’s frescoes, on initial glance, are astounding. I don’t necessarily mean that in a good way. Awe morphs to vertigo as hundreds of discombobulated bodies wrestle in rainbow bed sheets. Naked folk float over all kinds of beasts of The Last Judgment while wise men with scrolls make proclamations, as is their wont, to virgins flanked by cherubic babies along the ceiling’s perimeter. At the center in La Creazione, God bestows Adam with the world.
Here we recall King Solomon. To him, all we do is remix. Human creation is therefore not so much a process of deriving something from nothing as it is rebirthing ideas. Implicit is the belief that real originality is reserved for the divine. We must put our faith in a higher power.
The thought sparks some uneasiness. I may be primed by my physical condition - drenched in the sweat of Italian summer, craning up for a view with hundreds of fellow sheep, resisting the urge to take a quick pic. Luckily, as the crowd squeezes down and out, it’s possible to find a seat on the edges. Leaning back, the noise blends into a rhythm. Its coherence, set in stone, is somehow in medias res. Michelangelo managed to take humanity’s two most chaotic scenes - the Beginning and the End - and distill them into a continuous tapestry of beauty. With the frescoes, Michelangelo glued parts of the church's fracturing back together. As a result, he directly confirmed the doctrine of divine inspiration. God's plan was always the only way forward [9].
Outside St. Peter’s Basilica, I reluctantly overpay for an icy Evian and think back to Milan as God holds a magnifying glass overhead.
While the Sistine Chapel condenses 300 figures in 1 grand story, Leonardo's Last Supper is a lone moment frozen in perpetuity. Lacking formal training, Leonardo called on hard-earned, empirical knowledge of optics to make the 15x30 ft scene not look distorted from farther distances it’d be viewed from. Up too close, it’d be uncanny, like how zooming into many current AI photos makes them look demented. Additionally, he took creative liberties, for example seating everyone horizontally at the table even though they wouldn’t do this in real life, to make sure the message wasn’t lost.
Though the optical tricks worked, Leonardo’s experimental technique with oil-based paint did not, which is why half the museum is about its Sisyphean restoration through weather and war. Accessing the refectory is like passing through a spaceship airlock chamber, with rides capped at 15 minutes. And guides are not known for punctuality, especially when you don’t pre-book and have to buy access from a sketchy site. But no matter how much they gatekeep it, Leonardo crafted the effects so the Lord Himself beckons you to the table upon entering. By cross-pollinating earthly experience and fudging the story to fit accordingly, Leonardo - unlike Michelangelo - subtly undermined the Church’s creed of heavenly insight. Iterate forward, as God's plan is to die by betrayal and let us figure it out.
It’s pouring rain now, but I’m standing in line to see the Pantheon from the inside because the outside truly is not enough. I feel proudly American for squeezing every last thing in the schedule before flying out. Passing the pillars, I’m flabbergasted that the dome has a hole in it, and this is on purpose. I peer through as if I’d see anything other than the sky.
In this light, the simpler explanation of Leonardo’s outsized legacy rings true: he seeded humanity’s conception of scientific beauty. In doing so, he brought creativity out of God’s purview, expanding our choices. Instead of only shaping stories from imagination, people started sourcing from the observed. By making scientific beauty salient, Leonardo made way for Galileo a hundred years later, and Newton a hundred after that. So while Michelangelo is recognized as second-to-none because he was ostensibly the maestro of remixing the classics with the current, Leonardo is elevated in history because he established what was to come.
In spite of differences in ethos, both seemed to know what would have staying power, with ridiculously high bars for what they liked. Leonardo and Michelangelo teach us that although they have distinct approaches, scientists and artists alike tell powerful stories in the search for beauty. And that stories are meaningful compressions revealing truths about life.
That said, we know that whatever reality is, it’s not as neat as distilled spirits claim. Salman Rushdie, in Languages of Truth, essentially describes the creator’s job as shaping this “protean” uncertainty. This can mean forming the formless as Michelangelo did, but it can also mean using fiction to contour truth like Leonardo.
That’s not to say something beautiful has to be clean and positive. Look no further than worthwhile horror (yes, it exists) or Past Lives (top 3 for me). Rushdie likes this taken to the extreme, honoring the magical realism popularized by Latin American greats. They toe the line between manic and awakening, depressing and poignant, finding truth in cracks of imperfection. Done right, this is Pan’s Labyrinth or Corpse Bride Tim Burton (not Alice in Wonderland Tim Burton).
Unlike me, though, Rushdie seems to embrace these stories’ often misanthropic resolutions. Spend enough time looking at cracks, you’ll probably fall in. The other side of that line is gratuitous in the way Lars Von Trier, and whoever made Old Boy, is. When this happens, I see novelty in pursuit of ugliness, not beauty. Random, riddled with humorless non-sequiturs. There are no resolutions in these truths, not least ones that satisfy. The witch eats Gretel. The end.
Stories like that highlight beauty in its absence. To be clear, I generally think we’re better off not consuming them at all. But some people find that knowing darkness helps us appreciate the light.
This exists on both sides of the spectrum. In the analytical extreme, I think the lack of beauty leads to nihilism. When encountering the dark side of forums like Less Wrong or Hacker News - picture the stereotypically cranky 4chan/ Reddit power user in a basement - it’s probably fair to say some dudes need to get outside, laugh with friends, and find something wholesome to believe in. Should the rationalist type not be excited by building a better future? Why so angry? As for the artistic worldview, a lack of beauty inevitably crosses the Rushdie line of absurdism. In clinical settings, this screams psychosis. The kind of hippy fervor behind tragedies like the Waco siege. To resist ugliness in the artistic realm, the trick seems to be staying rooted in the ego, and in the scientific, chilling out and opening your mind.
When we encounter ugliness, we sometimes fortify our convictions like that and send good vibes, or more often, get offended and lash out. Preferably, though, we can try to empathize before anything else. In the examples above, we could go meta like Postmodernists and assert a lack of resolution is the resolution. No need to resist because the value comes from the totality of experience. The work needs us to find meaning in it. Warhol would add that something beautiful does not have to be sincere either. In fact, best if it’s ironic. The banana taped on the wall not being art is the art. Again, while that is not my usual cup of tea, to each their own. And I do like Campbell’s soup. Your art, your choice. For the most part.
Yesterday's AI tools serviced this type of personal arbitration; today’s bots partner with us. Tomorrow’s agents might mediate the whole shebang, though we still get to decide if we buy the results and intervene if not. In the near term, even with AI tracks or something like just-in-time, 100% AI short form video, I’m optimistic enough of us will choose correctly [10].
Moreover, we do more than choose beautiful stories; we create them from the subjective truths of being alive. This is why I believe humans, not machines, will remain the best creative architects, even if AI does the bulk of what we think of today as actual work. To make meaning through stories, we need to draw on our conscious, lived experience. Ultimately, we are the ones who define and shape the stories that matter.
After somehow scoring back-to-back row 38s checking in for the leg home, I ease into a six hour layover at the gorgeous Dallas airport. Over an intimate skyline of condiment bottles and draft beer taps, steely clouds coalesce in muted bewilderment then blend into the heavens. I’m left wondering what comes next…
People regularly get this wrong trying to time structural shifts - for instance, by asking leaders what our kids should do to future proof their careers (it used to be code, now some say don't code, next they might say code again [11]). Chasing momentum, we’re tempted by broken models of where things are headed. I’m not sure a pendulum ever made sense in a world-historical lens, but nowadays we’re peering through Alice’s looking glass. Things feel increasingly fractal. Multiple truths coexist. Creative energy does not rock in a bipolar cradle anymore, if it ever did, but on a mechanical bull. Every day is Fashion Week.
But if I had to guess… I’ll phone my friend Perplexity, which suggests that if Postmodernism was about the ironic disintegration of meaning, Post-Postmodernism is emerging as something like reintegration of meaning and sincerity. Chopped up as it may feel. With AI, we might be bringing the act of creation away from scientifically observable by deterministic, reductive models, back to something integrated in another dimension. But rather than reverting to a paradigm bestowed by God, it appears we’re heading towards one created hand-in-hand with AI. Expression in a new language of truth, if you will. Armchair prognostication aside, what united the titans were not their methods, but their ability to create meaning through beauty. The universe is what we make of it, originated by God, humans, or AIs.
Our janky plane finally touches down in Austin, and everyone claps shamelessly. In turbulence, we should strap in with principles, maybe hold hands. We can’t time shifts, but we can recognize when the surface underfoot is moving, commit to our highest values, and stay standing. Sorry, seated trays up.
At work, this does not mean striving for efficiency or sensation as ends in themselves, but beauty in technical and nontechnical domains. In tech specifically, I don’t think we’ve ever been in a contest between hard science & engineering and artful design & marketing. It has not been about math people vs. word people, shape-rotators vs. wordcels. The winning archetype of eras doesn't swing from artistic savants like Jobs to brilliant engineers like Musk. Instead, it consistently rewards what they have in common: hardcore aesthetics. Jobs did this pushing perfect design, and Musk is now with things like the progression of the Raptor engines [12]. The market rewards those who seek beauty in what we’re doing.
In a wider sense, it’s no secret people increasingly want something to believe in. While protégés of the Renaissance helped papal power recover briefly, we know the broader megatrend separating church from state and dissolving central moral authority continued. Leaders, ever-alert, rally and/ or pander depending on how cynical you are. Some realign with traditional religion and institutions. Others build cults of personalities around secular darlings. Still others conjure the next generation of false idols (or in his case, demons to challenge). I don't know if we’ve seen long term winners emerge, but the sentiment that we need firm anchors and north stars continues to swell.
For every social media clown mocking assorted subcultures for simply caring about something, for every wet blanket calling for the burning of the flag, I think most of us see a silent majority working hard for a better life without shame. With inspiration, even. Whether we make sense of things through astrology & ayahuasca, cold plunges & ultramarathons, or the tried and true pairing of church & liquor, I hope we remember why we choose the vessels we do. I’ll spare you judgments on how we get there for now and instead emphasize the overall rediscovery of truth, meaning, and beauty. A return to aesthetics.
Not that those who know ever left. I watch that Maggie Rogers clip again and again because it says something about what we should strive for. Pharrell has zero notes for Maggie, but he remarks to the rest of the class that we all have the ability to create singular works. We have to be willing to seek what beauty means for us. Be "frank in our music, frank in our choices”.
You and I, there’s air in between.
Alaska is about letting go, and making way for ourselves.
- JJB
Endnotes
(Ecclesiastes 9:1)
The custom song drifted through like it had been there before, complete with references to their beloved dog. I was none the wiser. As it happens, the gang got back together soon after for the wedding of another couple from the group, whose first dance was to "Love You for a Long Time" - sung live by a friend with a great voice...
... by at least one Penn professor who shall remain nameless.
From When Einstein Walked with Gödel. Solid biographical sketches about different personalities who made important breakthroughs.
Or orbits, helixes, whatever model suits you. Obviously, slicing history like this can be stupid, but weaving patterns of imperfect meaning can be more useful than saying “too complex, don’t try”. As an aside, this helped me retain more about art than I used to. Instead of rote memorizing paintings & corresponding periods, we can scaffold stories while filling in facts. Scaffolding isn’t supposed to be permanent, anyways.
Analogously, for religion we could say something like the Renaissance's reformations restabilized fallout from the Church’s corruption and decadence, which arose from the consolidation of the Crusades that “saved” humanity from the disintegration of the Dark Ages. This eternal rhythm extends beyond the polytheistic Greco Romans to the shamanistic woo-woo of the ancients before them. I’m being a bit facetious, but you get the point.
Might be useful to start from the meta, juxtaposing Michelangelo’s essence with Leonardo’s. Michelangelo, a precocious talent, focused more narrowly while Leonardo developed in broad fits and spurts over time. Michelangelo, like the whiz kids of Silicon Valley, made multiple substantial accomplishments starting in his teens and was already a living legend entering his late 20s. His work materialized like vessels of the divine, rallying people around his genius until the day he died. We should also note that privately, Michelangelo was an ascetic curmudgeon, unhygienic with a crooked nose for most of his adult life. Leonardo, on the other hand, was conventionally attractive and athletic, always social with an entourage in tow. Critically, his work took decades to bloom. Though he demonstrated potential in young adulthood with exceptional collaborative works and unfinished commissions, it wasn’t until his late 30s, 40s, and 50s that Leonardo delivered all that he’s lauded for today. What's more, much of that was uncovered in journals after the fact, as scholars explored his estate in greater depth.
Even the way we can experience these works fits poetically. The Vitruvian Man is in a vault somewhere, rarely on public display due to concerns that the drawing will fade from light exposure. David occupies the center of an entire museum and is way bigger than textbooks make it out to be. If one wasn’t enough, there is an outdoor replica within 500 meters of the indoor original. The Vitruvian Man is universality scaled down to a hidden notebook sketch, while David is inflated larger than life in all its nude glory.
The never ending passageways of the Vatican to the Sistine Chapel evokes the Uffizi, where I felt strangely trapped in a funhouse of mirrors. I think about midnight gelato with friends in Rome, and how they joked that the same scenes repeat across chronological halls. What do we have around this corner, another Mary and the baby? Actually no, it’s two Marys and babies! It’s like 4-5 canonical stories were commissioned ad-nauseam over centuries: the Annunciation, Madonna and the Child, the Crucifixion, the Deposition & Resurrection. The Church really wanted to make sure people got the message: the divine is bestowed, accessible through the Spirit, inevitably taken away, and returned by the grace of God. It checks out that this went hand-in-hand with a structural reason for the patronage model feeding cultural production back then: the Church's restriction on usury, which limited financial markets and gave the wealthy fewer alternatives to put money into.
An explicit approach to enable this could mean conscious choice in shaping generative models or strict, user-controlled system instructions on content preferences (intuitively incorporated in the product, of course). I imagine capable teams have spent countless more brain cycles thinking about this and will attempt to deliver on such fronts. Worst case, this requires freedom to exit - Luddites exist for a reason - but something tells me doing so won’t be completely necessary.
If you really want one, a good answer might be literature and computational/ systems biology. The studies of life... with the caveat that they need to live life too. And physics/ history/ math/ linguistics/ programming/ electrical engineering/ law etc., if they make time to audit some classes or self study! So the real answer is what makes them curious.
It's worth noting Job's contemporary, Gates, is also often painted as the "brilliant engineer" yang to Job's yin, but he too had a relentless focus on pushing perfectly beautiful code.
Thanks to friends old & new, especially Nick, JP, Dan, Riley, Tanner, Ethan, Owen, J&C , E&S, K, M&M, S, P&B, A&J, D, C&N, and my parents for helping cultivate inspiration for this.
