1/ Get this moment right and you get Renaissance Florence. Get it wrong and you get the New Soviet Man —and the twenty million graves that came with him.
AI is a Renaissance. Three of its four pillars are already here. The fourth is on us.🧵
http://x.com/i/article/2063021741816127488
Positive users emphasize purpose and beauty in building AI while negative users dismiss Vijay Pande's renaissance-or-failure warning as lazy pessimism or respond with direct insults.
@vijaypande Pessimism is so lazy. Reasoned optimism is leadership.
1/ Get this moment right and you get Renaissance Florence. Get it wrong and you get the New Soviet Man —and the twenty million graves that came with him.
AI is a Renaissance. Three of its four pillars are already here. The fourth is on us.🧵
9/ AI can produce content, but it can't be present.
It can't sit with a dying parent, keep faith with a town, raise a child, restore a house, or make a judgment that costs it something.
That's where dignity moves next.
@vijaypande There’s purpose in building and beauty in the act
11/ It doesn't take many people. Florence had maybe 2000 patrons. Pick 1 piece — the book, the school, the aesthetic, the model person — and hold it long enough to matter. No Renaissance before ours knew it was one. We might. Let's build it on purpose. 👇
2/ Every Renaissance runs on the same four pillars: – a distribution shock – a recovery of buried knowledge – mobile patron capital – a new portrait of what it means to be human
The first three arrive on their own. The fourth has always had to be built by hand.
7/ AI is undermining the four old defenses of human dignity at once: Reason — machines reason faster. Making — machines generate on demand. Labor — it's moving to the machines. Even feeling, as AI mediates our attention and intimacy.
3/ Gutenberg printed the books; you still had to do the thinking. Now the thinking itself is cheap. A farmer in Iowa gets a research scientist's reasoning on her soil at midnight. A teenager in Lagos gets a private tutor on any subject, at any hour.
8/ Build the first three pillars without the fourth and it has gone very badly before. The USSR had all three — and a portrait: the New Soviet Man. It made the human a means, not an end. Twenty million graves were the cost.
10/ The person of 2050 isn't the best prompt engineer. They hold real things — a craft, a place, a few people in long mutual obligations, a tradition they're passing on.
They hold themselves to a standard their grandchildren will know about.
4/ AlphaFold handed structural biology to chemists, pharmacologists, and materials scientists all at once.
A thousand AlphaFolds are coming.
5/ The question isn't whether the capital exists.
It's whether it gets deployed as Medici-style patronage on individuals — or as winner-take-all platform extraction.
6/ Three pillars are standing. The fourth isn't. There's no exemplar of the AI age for a young person to look up to: no book, no school, no aesthetic, no model person.
We've handed builders tools and capital before we've handed them a portrait.
@kirbyman01 The Italian Renaissance ideals were truth, beauty, and wisdom. We as a society seem to be receding from each and need to turn back.
@vijaypande wake forest's bullpen is scary good
@vijaypande
@vijaypande
@vijaypande
@vijaypande
@vijaypande Fuck you
1/ Get this moment right and you get Renaissance Florence. Get it wrong and you get the New Soviet Man —and the twenty million graves that came with him.
AI is a Renaissance. Three of its four pillars are already here. The fourth is on us.🧵
http://x.com/i/article/2063021741816127488