Take a moment to think about what the world must have looked like to J.P. Morgan a century ago, before his death in 1913. A shrewd investor in emerging technologies like railroads, automobiles, and electricity, he was also an early adopter, installing one of the first electric generators in his house. Today, we might call him a Techno-Optimist.
He could scarcely imagine the dark days ahead: two world wars, the Great Depression, genocides, the rise of fascism and communism, and a decades-long Cold War. Had he lived to see it, he might have asked how, despite so many scientific and technological breakthroughs, things went so wrong.
Today, we are at a similar juncture, and there are worrying parallels to the 1920s, including paradigm-shifting technologies, a revolt against immigration, globalism, income inequality, and even a global pandemic. Now, like then, the choices we make will shape our future for decades to come. We need those who create the future to be rooted in the world we live in. They’re not.
Building for a rational universe
In the 1920s, a group of intellectuals in Berlin and Vienna, much like many of the Silicon Valley digerati today, became enamored with the engineering mindset. By this time, the technologies like the ones that Morgan invested in had begun to reshape the world. Much like Descartes, three centuries before, they thought that logic and rationality should rule human affairs.
Their patron saint was Ludwig Wittgenstein, and their bible was his Tractatus, which described a world made up of “atomic facts” that could be combined to create “states of affairs.” He concluded, famously, that “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent,” meaning that whatever could not be expressed in a logical form must be disregarded.
The intellectuals branded their movement logical positivism and based it on the verification principle. Only verifiable propositions would be taken as meaningful. All other statements would be treated as silly talk and gobbledygook. Essentially, if it didn’t fit in an algorithm, for all practical purposes, it didn’t exist.
Unfortunately, and again much like Silicon Valley denizens of today, the exuberant confidence of the logical positivists belied serious trouble beneath the surface. In fact, while the intellectuals in Berlin and Vienna were trying to put the social sciences on a more logical footing, logic itself was undergoing a foundational crisis that threatened the entire positivist project.
At the root of the crisis was something called Russell’s Paradox, which created strange, self-contradictory statements, such as “The barber shaves every man in town who does not shave himself.” Assume such a barber exists and you’re tied in a knot. It seemed like a small technical wrinkle, but it was a crack in the foundation that demanded repair.
Broken logic
David Hilbert, one of the most prominent mathematicians of the day, proposed a program to solve the foundational crisis. It rested on three pillars. First, mathematics needed to be shown to be complete in that every statement could be shown to be true or false. Second, mathematics needed to be shown to be consistent, no contradictions or paradoxes allowed. Finally, all statements need to be computable, meaning they yielded a clear answer.
Hilbert and his colleagues received an answer sooner than most had expected. In 1931, just 11 years after Hilbert laid out his program, 25-year-old Kurt Gödel published his incompleteness theorems. The result shocked the mathematical world. Gödel showed that any sufficiently powerful logical system could be either complete or consistent, but not both.
Put more simply, Gödel proved that every formal system will eventually break down. It will contain true statements that cannot be proved within the system itself. Logic would remain permanently limited, and the positivists’ hopes were dashed. You can’t engineer a society based on a logical system that is itself inherently incomplete. For better or worse, the world would remain a messy place.
Yet the implications of the downfall of logic turned out to be far different, and far more strange, than anyone had expected. In 1936, building on Gödel’s proof, Alan Turing published his own paper on Hilbert’s computability problem. Much like the Austrian, he found that all problems are not computable, but with a silver lining. As part of his proof, he included a description of a simple machine that could compute every computable number.
Ironically, Turing’s machine would usher in a new era of digital computing. These machines, constructed on the basis that they would all eventually crash, have proven to be incredibly useful, as long as we accept them for what they are—flawed machines. As it turns out, to solve big, important problems, we often need to discard our illusions first.
Building dwelling thinking
Underlying the positivist project was the rationalist assumption that we could overcome the flaws of human nature with pristine, faultless logic. Yet just the opposite happened. The 1930s and 1940s saw the rise of ideologies that claimed to be more “scientific,” only to see the world descend into an abyss of war and genocide.
In the aftermath, amidst the rubble and horror, the world needed to be rebuilt. That, in turn, demanded some thought about how and in what image. It was in this period that the German philosopher Martin Heidegger wrote his essay, Building Dwelling Thinking, in which he argued that to build for the world you need to know what it means to live in it:
“Building and thinking are, each in its own way, inescapable for dwelling. The two, however, are also insufficient for dwelling so long as each busies itself with its own affairs in separation instead of listening to one another. They are able to listen if both building and thinking belong to dwelling, if they remain within their limits and realize that the one as much as the other comes from the workshop of long experience and incessant practice.”
There is a fundamental difference between something designed for the way people actually live and dwell, and something designed to serve an abstract ideal. You feel it when trying to navigate an AI-powered customer service experience, or a self-service menu at an airport bar. When I lived in Moscow in 2003 and 2004, I was struck by the constant reminders that the city wasn’t designed for living, but for something else.
There’s just something dehumanizing about a world built solely for thinking and detached from dwelling. That’s probably why companies like Apple, Pixar, and Patagonia, that are able to harmonize building, dwelling, and thinking so deeply and consistently, win such devotion, because something that feels built for us validates us in a profound human way.
Careless people
In Careless People, former Meta executive Sarah Wynn-Williams describes the Silicon Valley executives she worked with as so wealthy and powerful that they had grown out of touch with many of the world’s realities. At one point, during discussion about how much to charge for internet service for refugees, she describes a senior leader’s surprise with the realization that the inhabitants of refugee camps don’t have jobs.
Today, we increasingly live in the world of the visceral abstract, where the technologies that shape our lives are deeply rooted in concepts, such as quantum mechanics and natural selection, that can’t be experienced directly. This is especially true for the next generation of technologies, such as artificial intelligence, synthetic biology and quantum computing.
When you design for the physical world by, say, building a bridge, there is natural feedback if the building and thinking are out of harmony with dwelling. People can get to where they want to go or they can’t. The path is smooth or bumpy. The view is beautiful, or it is ugly. We notice flaws, if not immediately, then eventually. But they come to light and can be corrected.
But in the world of the visceral abstract, things aren’t so concrete. Nation states can manipulate us on social media, our chatbots can shift our psychology and our genomes can be engineered to interact with our environment in new and different ways, without us being aware of it. As technologies grow more powerful, the potential for good and evil multiply.
This requires us to be not only careful, but connected—to not only think and build, but to dwell. We need to be suspicious of those who sell us visions of flawless logic; those visions are not only incomplete, they are inhuman. At some point, something has got to break.
