Opinion | The Prophet of Silicon Valley

I think if you’re looking for who is the most influential philosopher of the internet, who laid down the way Silicon Valley thought, at least in its more idealistic era, the person you come up with is Stewart Brand. “When I was young, there was an amazing publication called the Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the Bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand.” The Whole Earth Catalog had all those books: “How to Be a Beekeeper,” “How to Grow Sheep,” “How to Weave” and do all of the — goddamn, make candles. We were actually candle dipping. “It was sort of like Google in paperback form 35 years before Google came along.” You mentioned the Whole Earth Catalog, which is this remarkable, deep catalog of all these ways, tools and ways to fix things. And the first place I ever saw one physically was in the offices of OpenAI when I visited them —— – Really? – Before ChatGPT. This was probably 2021 or 2022. And I remember thinking that there was something almost ironic about this catalog that was so dedicated to making the world intelligible at this place where they were explaining to me that they didn’t understand the fundamental center of how their systems worked that they were creating something that one of its most fundamental characteristics was unintelligibility. They’re kind of alien intelligences, in a way. It’s going to move beyond human thought pretty quickly, and it’s certainly reaching out in terms of data space much wider than any human can in a much shorter time. And that fact alone puts us feeling like redwood trees trying to communicate with a hummingbird. They’re linked. They live together; the hummingbird maybe lives in the redwood tree. But the redwood tree isn’t capable of paying much attention to who’s in its branches or how fast they’re moving. And so these — we’re introducing new kind of pace layers into the world we live in. And the cellular, the brain moves really quickly. And they use computers because they don’t have to use chemicals the way our brain does. They go a lot faster. We can engineer at these levels more than we can understand.