Starting around the year -3000, with the coming of writing, humanity cogniton ceased to be a band-limited lifespan-limited anthology intelligence of those who spoke face-to-face, and become something more. Human memory and cognition could then span the entire world, anywhere a written message could be carried and read, and all of time forward as long as what had been written was preserved and recopied. That produced what I call the real ASI: the real Anthology Super-Intelligence. The real ASI is not some ASI that is the Artificial Super-Intelligence from some grifter dreaming of a fortune or some self-grifter TechBro deluded and high on his own supply. The real ASI is the now-5000 year old global-scale Anthology Super-Intelligence of the collective human mind since Uruk.
The modes and scale of that real ASI has undergone superinflationary growth at several moments in the past 5000 years. One was in the aftermath of Gutenberg in the mid-1400s. And another is ongoing today.
Looking at today’s ongoing episode, I see that today Princeton history professor David Bell seems somewhat alarmed and distressed:
David Bell: Another AI Apocalypse <[https://davidabell.substack.com/p/another-ai-apocalypse]>: ‘It occurred to me that if you fed all this material into an AI, you could produce a bot that would be a creepily close approximation of[—]me. It would have a lot of my memories. It would have a lot of my tics and habits. It could certainly reproduce my writing style…. It would recall a lot of things more quickly and precisely than I can do now—especially things that happened thirty or forty years ago. It would be tireless. Unlike the real me, it could be programmed to avoid bad jokes and puns, and to not repeat stories it had told fifty times already…. Now, it’s still hard to see why anyone would want to have such a bot created. As my friends, family and colleagues can all attest, one of me is enough—occasionally, more than enough…. Maybe my employer could use it to teach my courses after I retire, thereby saving the cost of hiring a replacement—not a great idea (on the other hand, it would be perfectly suited for some of the committees I have served on). About the only legitimate use I could see for it would be as a record available to descendants…. I never knew two of my grandparents...
And:
David Bell: AI P.S. <[https://davidabell.substack.com/p/ai-ps]>: ‘My friend Art Goldhammer, whose Substack[“The Sense of an Ending”]is very much worth following, points out that my dark fantasy about an AI bot version of myself is (of course) much closer to realization than I had thought. The economist Brad Delong has already built a BradBot (formally, a SubTuringBradBot) as an experiment, and to answer questions from his readers. You can read about it[here]. Rest assured that I will not be copying him any time soon…
My take is, of course, very different.
Am I deranged?
Did I read Neuromancer <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuromancer> and The Diamond Age <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age> at too young and impressionable an age?
I think not:
Start with a time and a place to which I often find myself returning: the exiled, post-torture post-fall of the Florentine Republic to the Medici, Niccolò Machiavelli, rusticating in the Tuscan countryside. There and then, nearly all of the relationships he has that are key to him are parasocial.
We know this because he tells us so, and we think he is serious about this <https://archive.org/details/machiavellitovettori1513/page/109/mode/1up>.
On December 10, 1513, from his farm seven miles south of Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio, where he had managed the machine of political power before the fall, at Sant’Andrea in Percussina, he writes to his friend Francesco Vettori—then Florentine ambassador in Rome, then a man still inside the machine of power from which Machiavelli has been so thoroughly and painfully ejected.
He describes his days in a comic and slightly grim mode:
He gets up with the sun.
He goes to check on the men cutting his timber.
He sets snares.
He carries a book down to a spring and reads of other people’s amorous passions while remembering his own.
He goes to the inn on the road.
On the way, he talks to the passing carters for whatever scraps of news of the wider world they carry.
At the inn, until evening, he plays cards and backgammon with the host, the butcher, the miller, and a couple of the men who run the lime-kilns.
There are shouted disputes over farthings that can be heard—he claims—all the way to San Casciano two miles away.
Thus the whole of Machiavelli’s living human society is a scrum of villagers and the recycled gossip of strangers.
Then this “Letter to Francesco Vettori” turns on its axis, in a way that has already been prefigured by the sentences:
I go to a spring, and from there to an aviary of mine. I have a book under my arm, Dante or Petrarch, or one of the minor poets like Tibullus, Ovid, and such. I read of their amorous passions and their loves; I remember my own and enjoy myself for a while in this thinking…
The axis-turning paragraph is this:
When evening comes, I return home and go into my study; and at the door I take off my muddy, sweaty workday clothes, and put on the robes of court and palace, and in this graver dress I enter the ancient courts of ancient men and am welcomed by them, and there I taste the food that alone is mine, and for which I was born. And there I make bold to speak to them and ask them the reasons for their actions; and they, in their humanity, answer me. And for the space of four hours I forget the world, remember no vexation, fear poverty no more, tremble no more at death: I pass entirely into their world…
Note what is happening: There are men who matters to Machiavelli—the society he dresses up for, the company whose good opinion he craves, the interlocutors who take his questions seriously and answer them. None of them are there at Sant’Andrea in Percussina. Indeed, none of them are alive. They are Livy and Tacitus and Polybius and the rest. They are the men who did and wrote about politics and affairs and governance when Rome and Italy were strong and great, rather than the whole country being the prey of French lancers, Spanish tercios, and Swiss mercenaries. They are a millennium and a half dead. They are available to him only as text.
His real friends in his books.
His most genuine and important conversations are with authors who cannot hear him and exist only in his mind’s eye and ear.
And out of those four-hour nightly séances with the honored dead comes—he mentions it almost in passing in the same letter—“a little work, De principatibus.” That little work is The Prince, which is his audition for a place in the Medici Department of State where he could be useful.
Ada Palmer <https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/ada-palmer-2> has thought about this scene as carefully as anyone I know. (Actually, not “know”, “know of”: I do not think I have ever met her, but my parasocial relationship with her is stronger than my one with David A. Bell.) She is very good on the pathos and the strangeness of it: the squalor of the tavern by day set against the imagined marble of the ancient courts by night; a mid-level ex-functionary in a bad jacket, in rural exile, reconstituting an entire intellectual life out of the printed page.
And she is very good on the thing that makes it possible, which is easy to miss because it is the water we swim in. Machiavelli can do this because he lives on the near side of a Singularity Break that is the invention of movable-type printing and the fifty-fold fall in the price of books. For Machiavelli, books are there and cheap. They can be accessed, at scale, by a man who is neither obscenely and absurdly rich nor a monk ttached to a great library. A generation or two earlier, the ancient courts he enters each evening would have been locked behind the cost and scarcity of manuscript. Print blew that open. Machiavelli is in the first generation in which people could and did have libraries.
Which is the point I have been circling toward for years. Here is where I plant the flag:
The real Singularity in modes of human cognition—the genuine discontinuity, the moment after which the rules governing what a single mind could do were simply different in kind—has already happened:
It came shortly after Gutenberg.
It is exactly what Machiavelli is doing in that study of his.
It is the moment after which an ordinary person could, cheaply and at will, summon the recorded reasoning of the greatest minds who ever lived, interrogate it, and think alongside it.
The mind plus its library function as a single cognitive system far larger than the skull that anchors it.
The individual human intellect stopped being bounded by the people it could physically reach and the few texts it could physically touch, and became a node wired into the accumulated, externalized, copyable memory of the species. I call this the real ASI, the Anthology Super-Intelligence of the collective human mind: Machiavelli’s relationship to his books is the first moment at which we can see clearly. His personal library is not a storehouse he consults. It is a set of colleagues he collaborates with. He asks; they answer; something new—The Prince—is produced by the pairing that neither party could have produced alone. That is augmented cognition. That is a human being running his intelligence on hardware vastly bigger than his own brain. And it became a normal, reproducible, world-transforming thing right around 1500, and it gave us the Republic of Letters, the Scientific Revolution, and eventually the modern world.
So when people tell me that we are now, today, living through the arrival of a machine that can hold up its end of a conversation with the whole written corpus, that can be asked the reasons for things and answer in its humanity—well, yes, I say. It is genuinely useful, I say. I use it, I say.
But let us keep our sense of proportion.
What is happening now is an extension of the Machiavellian Singularity, not a rival to it: a faster index, a more fluent and more tireless interlocutor sitting on top of the exact same accumulated textual inheritance that print created and that print made cheap. The break already happened. We have been living on the far side of it for five hundred years. Machiavelli, in his good jacket, at night, talking to the dead, was already there.
Machiavelli rusticating post-torture in exile is perhaps different from Machiavelli in office, at his desk in Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio trying to keep the city he loves from being sacked by the French lancers, the Spanish tercios, or the Swiss mercenaries. His life before had been different, and not book- or library-centered. The man who wrote that famous letter about putting on his robes at nightfall to converse with the ancient dead had spent the previous fourteen years living a life in which books were not the first place he would have thought to look for a colleague.
Up to 1512 Machiavelli was Second Chancellor of the Florentine Republic and secretary to the Ten of War. He was a working bureaucrat of the most intensely practical kind. More than that, he was one of the Florentine Republic’s roving set of eyes. They sent him out. They sent him to the court of Louis XII of France, more than once, to take the measure of a king who held Florence’s fate in his pocket and largely could not be bothered to notice. They sent him into the Romagna to shadow Cesare Borgia through the autumn and winter of 1502, to sit in the same rooms as that astonishing and terrifying man and to watch, at close range, how he flattered and stalled his treacherous captains. How he then met them at Senigallia with kisses and soft words of friendship. How he lured them into a room. How he then had them all strangled.
They sent him to Rome for a papal conclave, to the camp of Julius II, to the Emperor Maximilian. And when he was not on the road he was building the thing he desperately tried to establish: a Florentine militia of citizen-soldiers he attempted to cajol and drill into existence because he had concluded, from watching, that mercenaries were a swindle and a danger.
That is not a life of the study. That is a life of the saddle. That is a life of the audience chambe and the dispatch pouch. The intelligence Machiavelli ran in those years ran on live human intercourse and on nothing else. His raw material was faces: the flicker across a king’s expression, the calculated menace of a Borgia, the venality of a hired captain, the mood of a city council on the morning after bad news.
TrueL his method of composition was the same, only faster—the thousands of official letters, the legazioni, that he fired to and from Florence, written not to be admired but to be acted on before the situation changed. He was reading, ceaselessly, at the top of his powers. But what he was reading was men and events, in the flesh, in real time, and the text was gone the instant it was produced.
For a man whose principal operating system had been embodied, oral, face-to-face, right-now human contact, the exile was not merely a demotion and a humiliation and a physical agony—six drops on the strappado will do that—it was an amputation. The Medici come back in 1512 on the points of Spanish pikes; Prato is sacked; Piero Soderini flees; the Republic falls; Machiavelli is turned out of the only work he had ever loved, then jailed and tortured on suspicion of a conspiracy he had nothing to do with, then released into the countryside to rot. The channels through which his mind had predominantly drawn its nourishment for fourteen years is cut off. No more legations. No more Borgia to study. No more council to persuade. No more dispatches anyone will read and react to immediately.
The man of affairs is marooned. The only interlocutors left within reach are the ones on the shelf. So he turns to the shelf. And that—this is my strong reading—is why the letter to Vettori reads the way it reads. Why the whole elaborate business of it: coming home at dusk, stripping off the muddy workday clothes, putting on the robes of court and palace, crossing a threshold into “the ancient courts of ancient men,” being received, being fed the food that alone is his. A man who had lived his whole intellectual life inside books would never dramatize the act of opening one. He would simply open it, the way you and I open a laptop, without ceremony, because it is Tuesday.
You do not narrate the water to a fish.
The ceremony is the tell. The costume-change I quoted a moment ago is the report of a man to whom this mode of thinking is new, and strange, and slightly miraculous—a convert describing his conversion, an immigrant describing the customs of the country he has just, unwillingly, been forced to enter. And immigrants notice what natives do not.
That is the deep reason Machiavelli is our best witness to the thing I have been calling the real cognition Singularity. He is standing exactly on the seam. He spent his triumphant working life inside a cognitive world in which knowledge was primarily something you acquired by being physically present to people and events, a world essentially continuous with Thucydides’ or Cicero’s. Then he was thrown against his will into the new world in which knowledge summoned at will from cheap printed texts, the accumulated recorded reasoning of the honored dead available on demand to a broke ex-official on a hillside in Percussina. He got to feel both, hard, in a single lifetime. He knew what he had lost. That is why he could register so acutely what he had, improbably, found: that the books could talk back; that they would “in t…
