We have a collective need to frame the tensions we're all seeing in what is certainly an AI transformation. @vijaypande has spent decades transforming biology with tech. His essay is an historic view of transformations and poses a "what we're missing now" that makes us think…💯

4/ AlphaFold handed structural biology to chemists, pharmacologists, and materials scientists all at once.

A thousand AlphaFolds are coming.

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.

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.

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. 👇

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.

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.

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.

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.

@vijaypande Pessimism is so lazy. Reasoned optimism is leadership.

@vijaypande There’s purpose in building and beauty in the act

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.

@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.

@mkoeris 🙏🏽

@vijaypande Your words were well received, the only concern is that lack of presence with AI as you noted. It is because AI doesn't have skin in the game that it seems wildly out of touch in some scenarios. AI is inevitable, but it is very much still in the toddler phase in many ways.

@vijaypande wake forest's bullpen is scary good

@calleymeans so either we comply with the utopian visions of AI zealots or millions will die

noted

@vijaypande What about a design language for biology? That's what we're working on: https://americanwetware.substack.com/p/biology-has-a-design-language

@vijaypande YES