In the beginning, the Editors created a theme: Origins. Now the issue was formless and empty, blankness was over the pages, and the spirit of inspiration was hovering in the blinking cursor.
And the Editors said, “Let there be pitches,” and there were pitches. We called the good pitches “printworthy,” and the not-quite-right pitches we called “thank you.” And there was a lineup, and there were due dates — the first editorial meeting.
And the Editors considered running with the Genesis gambit for the whole editorial, but they decided it sufficed as an opening. We’ve made our point: We humans have a burning desire to ask “How did this begin?”
Sometimes, though, that’s hard to answer. Take Étienne Fortier-Dubois’ historical tech tree, from which branch 1500 of humanity’s most important technologies. (He’d like us to specify that it’s technically a directed acyclic graph.) As Étienne shows, though we like to think of innovation as discrete, progress is neither linear nor deterministic. It takes work to trace it back to one point.
Sometimes things branch in ways we can’t predict. Sometimes, libertarians have a surprising affection for the progressive populist Henry George. As Reed Schwartz writes, although George’s land value tax did inspire many progressives, it also found purchase among everyone from Zionist socialists to anti-Semitic conservatives, before eventually gaining favor with Peter Thiel.
Creation myths are meant to be memorable. So is political messaging. Both tend to be less than strictly true. Ask anyone why California still lacks high-speed rail two decades after approving it, and you’ll get one of two reductive answers: regulations or incompetence. Both sides have a point, but Rob Davidoff diagnoses the problem as more fundamental: commitment issues.
One thing America can still build is a highway. But it’s a lot harder — politically — to make those roads safe. Driving in America is as dangerous as driving in Syria. As Abi Olvera shows, this is a choice. European countries pioneered approaches to slashing road fatalities decades ago. This “Safe System” is one America professes to be adopting, but the reality is that we’ve barely even begun.
Humanity’s fall begins with an act of disobedience. Agustina Paglayan makes the case that the education system begins with state desire for obedience, specifically in 18th-century Prussia. We spoke with Agustina about the vestiges of that system in today’s classrooms. Coincidentally (these seem to happen every issue), the modern research university also dates to 18th-century Prussia, but, as Clara Collier describes, the system that emerged there isn’t exactly what anyone involved planned. (What that means for how we think about shaping institutions we’ll leave to our friends in progress studies.)
The university remains an imperfect system. Since the replication crisis began, academia is still, shall we say, lost in the wilderness. Ryan Briggs argues that our top social science journals publish work that doesn’t meet the lowest bar of reliability — does the even code run? — let alone implement systems to ensure policy has a legitimate evidence-base. Speaking of faulty code: Try (10100) + 1 - (10100) on your iPhone calculator right now. You’ll get the wrong answer. Andre Popovitch has the story of how Android gets the Book of Numbers we carry around in our pockets right.
We wish such a calculator existed for AI, but alas. In lieu: a debate between Ajeya Cotra and Aravind Naryanan on the pace of AI development, and whether we’ll have warning signs before AI grows powerful enough to destabilize society. Fiction still does the best job of imagining a world in which those capabilities exist. Louis Evans has a piece on just that — and the many lives of a man named David Michaelson.
And finally, what is the feasibility of preserving life — or at least, the human brain? Aurelia Song shares the origins of the field of cryonics, where it went wrong, and whether we can get it right.
In all of this, what did we learn about origins? When we assigned this issue, we thought we’d be publishing cut and dry origin stories. Instead, we have something different: stories of interconnections lacking discrete beginnings and ends, of disagreement about the real source of a problem, of confusion about how something came about at all. We went looking for creation tales, and instead we found something (permit us the interfaith metaphors) that looks more like what the Buddhists call dependent origination: All phenomena arise in dependence upon other phenomena. Everything emerges from relationship. We designate a beginning only for the sake of the story.
And the Editors saw all that they had made, and it was very good. And there were print copies, and there were readers — the 10th issue.
— Jake & Clara
