The Cloister and the Starship
The university of the future must revive ancient ways of learning to enable human mastery of artificial intelligence
Near the beginning of Neal Stephenson’s 1995 novel The Diamond Age, there is a memorable exchange between a computer engineer named Hackworth and an “equity lord”—a tech billionaire, as we would say—with the wonderful surname of Finkle-McGraw. The engineer alludes to some research work he has been doing.
