Technology creators are leading the battle of ideas about the future. Sutskever, Altman, and Aschenbrenner all discuss the nature of reality and the outlook for intelligence, with a prominence that marked the most distinguished and experienced thinkers before. Today, what gets public attention comes from tech people in their thirties instead of, as it used to be, recognized intellectuals in their sixties. 

What the people of Silicon Valley loudly say resonates thanks to the market, which echoes their predictions like a resonance chamber, resounding with a mirage of future products, services, and improvements. Because the market works as an instrument for them, when they say, they sell too. 

Their revolutionary ideas are for sale to investors. Those reverberate in nonfiction books that are also products to be sold (especially books on AI) — the same with commercial keynote addresses, podcasts, and multiple other formats. 

Yet amplifying market influence is not the biggest issue here. On my journey of writing the book “Re-becoming“, I realized that most of the things we’re discussing today are actually not new. The math behind LLMs is novel, but not the fundamental underpinnings of progress or its results for us, such as:

These ideas were discussed by the most prominent thinkers of the pre-digital era with shocking, up-to-date conclusions we often know little of. And if relevant clues have already been drawn, why not use them today?

Today’s tech gurus have no time for it. They need to catch up to the competition, so looking in the rear mirror seems a time-waster. The market would not allow it anyway, as a glance at the rear mirror would distract them from the race they are in. 

The market also seemed not to be standing in the way so much before. And when it did, like for some of the wealthiest thinkers I cite in my book, they gave their fortunes away, freeing their intellectual powers from the market’s influence. By that, their testament is, in many ways, more honest and revealing.

By deciding to reintroduce their voice to the modern reader, I had to adjust their language to meet our present context.  In technical jargon, it’s called ‘refactoring’ — when the code is rewritten to meet certain new criteria. In entertainment, it’s called ‘reboots’ when, for example, Spiderman movies are re-released repeatedly to update the franchise’s universal story and message to remain relevant.  We don’t have much of ‘refactors’ or ‘reboots’ in knowledge pursuits, and that’s why I decided to give it my best shot by writing ‘Re-Becoming’

The book is riddled with bits of brilliance from people who pondered progress and technology across ages to come out with an enlightening message. For example: 

There’s so much material that I did my best to fill the storyline with the most hitting ideas. At the end of the process, I felt cheated by the education system for not including these fundamental thoughts in the curriculum. As a practitioner in the tech industry and a humanist at heart, I had to do the work of re-sewing the fabric of my own thought. That led me to write “Re-becoming”. I share it now with the hope it supports the intellectual pursuit of others.