The most dangerous man in the room exhibit

What about self-perception? What about the emotional becoming? How can the sentiment of impotence, mental suffering and ethical disease be reabsorbed, healed or at least cauterized? By the word ‘automaton’ I do not mean a machine, but a super-individual bio-informatic organism that can traverse sensible singularities but cannot be traversed by them. The bio-info superorganism produces meaning by following rules that are compliant with the digital machine, and can act effectively only within the semiotic universe of connection. The automaton takes the place of the sensitive, conscious individual organism able to pursue effective strategies of differentiation and transform its environment accordingly: this was the meaning of politics, in the sphere of alphabetical sequential communication. The financial agent, on the contrary, produces effects only if his strategies comply with the strategy of the automaton.

Conjunctive enunciation cannot be effective in the sphere of connective concatenation because it does not possess the code to access the technical syntax of the connective machine. Only enunciations compatible with the connective logic can function and produce real effects. This is why the political will, and particularly the democratic process of decision, is unable to counter financial power. The relation between social life and the financial system is automated, inscribed in the technical network of governance. The social body that rebels against the automaton is obliged to choose between impotence and suicide. Replaced by connective governance, the conjunctive body is reduced to impotence. Not surprisingly the suicide rate has been growing (60 per cent, according to the World Health Organization) over the last four decades. Not surprisingly, terrorist suicides are also spreading.

‘America first’ implies a declaration of rolling back from empire. But America is not only a nation, or a political entity. It is also first and foremost a cultural process of trans-human metamorphosis, embodied in technology and culture. As the political potency of the American nation declines irreversibly, the deterritorialized power of technology is transforming global behaviour, the global mind and the global unconscious. The engineers, futurists, scientists and entrepreneurs of the Global Silicon Valley are continuously transforming the mindscape of the planet. No roll-back will be possible at this level. As a nation and as a military power, the United States of America will never regain its position of dominance that seemed unshakeable after the collapse of the Soviet empire. Does that mean that America is declining and the twenty-first century will not be American? If we try to better define ‘America’, if we start from the original decision of the Founding Fathers to displace the house of God from the old continent to the New-Found Land, we can acknowledge that ‘America’ is not the name of a territory but rather the name of a deterritorialization. The Puritan imprint on American culture is not only a mark of religious dissidence from the history of European religious wars, it is also the project of purification of the future from the slag heaps of the past. Puritanism, indeed, is the name of the desire to create a new world in a space that is pure of history and culture, and distinct from reality itself: in this religious space, virtualization was conceived. This is why America (and not the United States) is the future of the world. America is the deterritorialized dimension of digital dis-identity. A virtual and recombinant dis-identity. Desiring to be American while simultaneously hating the United States, is the paradox of many world populations. Millions of people thus try to react against their own subaltern imagination: they cannot succeed because they are intimately colonized. The only way to stop the deterritorialized domination of America is to destroy the world itself: the political project of Islamic fundamentalism. Cognitive automation or ultimate all-destroying war. Or both.

The process of externalization and privatization is now provoking a worldwide civil war that is feeding on itself. According to Nicholas Kristof, ‘In the last four years, more people have died in the United States from guns (including suicides and accidents) than Americans died in the wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq combined.’ We are not heading towards a third world war. There will be no declaration of war, but a proliferation of uncountable combat zones. There will be no unification of the fronts, but fragmented micro-conflicts and uncanny alliances with no general strategic vision. ‘World war’ is not the right term for this very original form of apocalypse we are now in. I call it ‘fragmentary global civil war’. The fragments are not converging, because the war is everywhere. According to Ash Carter, former American secretary of defense, ‘Destructive power of greater and greater magnitude falls into the hands of smaller and smaller groups of human beings.’

In conditions of war privatization, no geopolitical order of the world can be imagined, no consent among the conflicting religious tribes can be pursued. No beginning, no end because this war is endless, as it was decreed in 2001 by George Bush and Dick Cheney, who willingly fell into the trap set by bin Laden. From the Paradise where he certainly dwells, bin Laden looks upon the present emergence of the Caliphate of Death, smiling: so far, he can claim that the Army of Allah is winning the war. Some American Republicans say that the spontaneous killing sprees that occur with regularity are the product of mental illness. They are right in a way, but they wrongly categorize what they label mental illness. This mental illness is not the rare malady of some isolated social dropout; it is the widespread consequence of panic, depression, precariousness and humiliation. These, too, are at the heart of the contemporary fragmentary global war, and they are spreading everywhere, rooted as they are in the legacy of colonialism and in the frantic competition of the everyday. Neoliberal deregulation has given birth to a worldwide regime of necro-economy: moral prescriptions and legal regulations have been annulled by the all-encompassing law of competition. From its very beginning, Thatcher’s philosophy prescribed war among individuals. Hobbes and Darwin and Hayek have been summoned to conceptualize the end of social civilization, the end of peace. Forget about the religious or ideological labels of the agents of massive violence; look at their true natures. Take the Sinaloa Cartel and Daesh, then compare them to Blackwater and to Exxon Mobil. They have much more in common than not. Their shared goal is to extract a maximum of money from investment in the most exciting products of the contemporary economy: terror, horror and death.

Abstraction and Automation During the last century, abstraction has been the main tendency of the general history of the world in the field of art, language and economics. Abstraction can be defined as the mental extraction of a concept from a series of real experiences, but it can be also defined as the separation of conceptual dynamics from bodily processes. Since the time Marx spoke of ‘abstract labour’ to refer to the working activity as separate from the useful production of concrete things, we know that abstraction is a powerful engine. Thanks to abstraction, capitalism has detached the process of valorization from the material process of production. As productive labour turns into a process of info-production, abstraction becomes the main source of accumulation, and the condition of automation. Automation is the insertion of abstraction into the machinery of social life, and consequently it is the replacement of an action (physical and cognitive) with a technical engine. Taking the view of cultural history, the first part of the twentieth century is marked by the emancipation of signs from a strictly referential function: this may be seen as the general trend of late modernity, the prevailing tendency in literature and art as in science and politics. In the second part of the century, the monetary sign, however, reclaims its autonomy, and since Nixon’s decision, after a process of monetary deregulation, the arbitrary self-definition of monetary dynamics has been firmly established: money shifts from referential to self-referential signification. This is the condition for the automation of the monetary sphere, and for the submission of social life to this sphere of abstraction. Automation, which is electronic, does not represent physical work so much as programmed knowledge. As work is replaced by the sheer movement of information, money as a store of work merges with informational forms of credit.5 Retracing the history of money, from exchange commodity to representative money to standard value to electronic abstraction, McLuhan writes: The Gutenberg technology created a vast new republic of letters, and stirred great confusion about the boundaries between the realms of literature and life. Representative money, based on print technology, created new speedy dimensions of credit that were quite inconsistent with the inert mass of bullion and of commodity money. Yet all efforts were bent to make the speedy new money behave like the slow bullion coach. J. M. Keynes stated this policy in A Treatise on Money: Thus the long age of Commodity Money has at last passed finally away before the age of Representative Money. Gold has ceased to be a coin, a hoard, a tangible claim to wealth, of which the value cannot slip away so long as the hand of the individual clutches the material stuff. It has become a much more abstract thing – just a standard of value; and it only keeps this nominal status by being handed round from time to time in quite small quantities amongst a group of Central Banks.6 Only when it is abstracted (that is, separated from the referent, and disembodied) can monetary dynamics be automated, submitted to the rules of a non-referential sphere of signification and the attribution of value. Information takes the place of things, and finance – which once used to be the sphere where productive projects could meet capital, and where capital could meet productive projects – emancipates itself from the constraints of physical production: the process of capital valorization (increase of money invested) no longer passes through the creation of use value. As the referent is cancelled and financial accumulation is enabled by the mere circulation of money, the production of goods becomes superfluous to financial expansion. The accumulation of abstract value depends on the subjugation of the population to debt, and on the predation of existing resources. This emancipation of capital accumulation from the production of useful things results in a process of annihilation of social welfare. In the sphere of financial economy, the acceleration of circulation and valorization implies the elimination of the concrete usefulness of products because the faster information circulates, the faster value is accumulated. Purely financial information is the fastest of things, while the production and distribution of goods is slow. The process of the realization of capital, namely the exchange of goods with money, slows the pace of monetary accumulation. The same happens in the field of communication: the less meaning the message has the faster it moves, given that production and interpretation of meaning take time, while the circulation of pure information without meaning is instantaneous. In the last twenty years, computers, electronic exchanges, dark pools, flash orders, multiple exchanges, alternative trading venues, direct access brokers, OTC derivatives and high-frequency traders have totally changed the financial landscape and particularly the relation between human operators and self-directing algorithmic automatons. The more you remove the reference to physical things, to physical resources and the body, the more you can accelerate the circulation of financial flows. This is why, at the end of this process of abstraction-acceleration, value does not emerge from a physical relationship between work and things, but rather from the infinite self-replication of virtual exchanges of nothing with nothing. Inscription of Rules Some open-minded techno-financial agents, as well as groups of social activists, are promoting the idea that alternative currencies can be useful tools for undoing the financial trap from the inside. The open-minded financial agents are inspired by the libertarian persuasion that the economic sphere has to be free from the state and from centralized monetary control. They are looking for a possibility for the democratization of the financial sphere. I don’t know if the function of money can be subverted or if money can be used as a tool for disentangling social life and production from financial capitalism that presently uses monetary dynamics as a tool for subjugating knowledge and work. Experience says that money can act as an automator, the ultimate automator of social life. Experience shows that removing spaces in which we live from monetary exchange and codification (insolvency, non-monetary exchange) is the way to create spaces for autonomy. Insolvency is the most effective way to resist the financial blackmail that is systematically destroying society. But organized insolvency is only possible when social solidarity is strong, and in the present condition the links of solidarity are weak. Although there have been mass protests in the streets, people have not lately been able to keep solidarity alive for long. This is why insolvency – the active refusal to pay debt and undeserved taxation, the refusal to pay for basic services, the permanent occupation of spaces and buildings, and the sabotage of austerity – has not really grown roots in the social scene over these last years. Rudimentary forms of alternative currencies for local exchange have appeared lately in many places across Europe, adding to experiences like the sharing of time and basic services and goods. But community currencies can only become a significant form of exchange when social solidarity is strong enough to nurture trust and mutual help. More sophisticated forms of alternative currencies have been promoted by highly skilled programmers: Bitcoin is the best known of these. Generating money is a technical problem, but replacing financial money with alternative money is a problem of trust. Alternative currencies could serve as a game changer, this is quite possible, and up to a certain point it is already happening. But it is not clear how these alternatives can act as surrogates for a more fundamental lack of social solidarity. Algorithmic money, however, can act as the ultimate tool for automation: automation of behaviour, of language, of relation, automation of evaluation and exchange. Regardless of the intentions of Bitcoin miners, their monetary action is going to heighten the level of automation in the sphere of social exchange. What is interesting to me is the techno-linguistic automation of the relations among people: economic and financial relations are no longer the object of an ethical negotiation or of a political decision. They are more and more inscribed in the code that gives access to a certain service, or to a certain possibility of having a job, and so on and so forth. Coding personal relationships into programming language is the current tendency: crypto-money and crypto-contracts transform ever more the relations among people into the execution of programming, into a sequence of acts that one must accomplish in order to access the following step. The normative function of law is replaced by the automatic implication of human agents reduced to merely operational functions. The overcoming of the industrial system has been enabled by the translation of physical acts into information. The automation of linguistic interaction and the replacement of cognitive and affective acts with algorithm sequences and protocols is the main trend of the current mutation.

We are approaching the end of this book, and I’m going to disclose my true intention: I did not want to write only about impotence, or about possibility. I wanted to write about knowledge. Beyond impotence and power, beyond the fragmentation of society into a myriad of conflicting pieces, beyond the precarious fractalization of labour, knowledge is the social dimension where the bad dream of capitalism can be dispelled at last: not simply reversed, I mean wholly abandoned as an empty space, forgotten as a nightmare. My approach to the problem of knowledge is not gnoseological, because what interests me more is the subjectivity that underlies the process of knowledge: the subjectivity of millions of minds connected worldwide, and the subjectivity of bodies who look for affection, sensuous contact and friendship. The consciousness of knowledge is the way to the emancipation of the future, but this way is obstructed by the privatization of the educational system, of research and of the entire cycle of invention. Knowledge is not about truth, or about discovering and displaying the essential reality – it is rather about the creation of meaning and the invention of technical interfaces projecting meaningfulness into reality.

Knowledge in Hegel is a process that does not really develop anything, is never invention: it is only discovery of something that has existed since the beginning. The Absolute Being is the premise and the result of the process of knowledge, as knowledge is from the beginning the process of self-deployment of the Absolute Being. The social process of knowledge, in its concrete manifestations, contradictions, difficulties, conundrums and misunderstanding, in its discoveries and inventions, does not exist. It is only the mediation of the self-revealing of the Absolute Spirit. Nevertheless, in this text there is a far-reaching intuition: the process of knowledge cannot be dissociated from the historical process, and there is no other truth than the self-deployment of the subject of knowledge. That the truth is only realized in the form of system, that substance is essentially subject, is expressed in the idea which represents the Absolute as Spirit (Geist) … Spirit is the only Reality. It is the inner being of the world, that which essentially is, and is per se; it assumes objective, determinate form, and enters into relations with itself – it is externality (otherness), and exists for self; yet, in this determination, and in its otherness, it is still one with itself – it is self-contained and self-complete, in itself and for itself at once. This self-containedness, however, is first something known by us, it is implicit in its nature (an sich); it is Substance spiritual. It has to become self-contained for itself, on its own account; it must be knowledge of spirit, and must be consciousness of itself as spirit. This means, it must be presented to itself as an object, but at the same time straightway annul and transcend this objective form; it must be its own object in which it finds itself reflected. So far as its spiritual content is produced by its own activity, it is only we [the thinkers] who know spirit to be for itself, to be objective to itself; but in so far as spirit knows itself to be for itself, then this self-production, the pure notion, is the sphere and element in which its objectification takes effect, and where it gets its existential form. In this way, it is in its existence aware of itself as an object in which its own self is reflected. Mind, which, when thus developed, knows itself to be mind, is science. Science is its realisation, and the kingdom it sets up for itself in its own native element.

speaking of the social cooperation of intellectual workers who are not fulfilling a pre-inscribed design of rationality, rather combining fragments of knowledge according to different (conflicting) intellectual projects. Their intentions do not converge towards a pre-inscribed whole, they are not pursuing any telos. The enforced embedding of a prescriptive telos in the activity of cognitive workers is the peculiar action of power: an act of limitation, of subjection. The neoliberal reform of the educational system, that consists in privatization, is aimed at the submission of research to economic dogma. The next fight will be about the autonomy of knowledge from the epistemological and practical hegemony of the economic paradigm. The autonomy of knowledge is not a philosophical issue; it is a social issue, as it is based on the concrete potency of concrete social actors: cognitive workers, workers who produce value inside the semiotic machine. The autonomy of knowledge presupposes the independence of those who animate the general intellect. When we wrote of ‘general intellect’, those two words in English, he was envisioning a technological environment that did not exist in his time. More than one hundred years later, we know that this environment and this universal machine is the worldwide net that enables the continuous recombination of semiotic acts (research, invention, communication) performed simultaneously by conscious and sensitive agents scattered everywhere across the Earth.

As cognitive labour became the main force of valorization, the economic powers tried to submit cognitarians to the ideology of merit, or meritocracy, in order to destroy the social solidarity of the intellectual force. As it rewards intellectual primacy with money, the concept of the meritocracy acts as the Trojan horse of neoliberal ideology. Meritocracy is the hotbed of precariousness, fostering competition: when individuals are obliged to fight for survival, intellectual and technical abilities are reduced only to tools for economic confrontation. When solidarity is broken and competition becomes the rule, research and discovery are disassociated from pleasure and solidarity. Unfortunately indeed, meritocracy is also a stimulus for ignorance. As the evaluation of merit is acknowledged by the authority, and as the criteria of evaluation are fixed by those who have power, the learner is invited to adopt the evaluation criteria corresponding to the existing powers. Education has been the most powerful factor of social autonomy. If we accept meritocracy, we renounce the autonomy of the learning process and accept that the evaluation of our formation is wholly in another’s hands. A crucial passage in the process of the subjection of knowledge is the current dismantlement of the public education system, privatization of the university and the resulting subjugation of research to the operational rules of the financial economy. This implies the principle of epistemic primacy in economic reason that violates the autonomy of the institutions of knowledge production and transmission. The defining feature of the modern university was the autonomy of knowledge (namely its autonomy from the primacy of theology). The contemporary imposition of the economy’s primacy, however, implies the cancellation of the autonomy of knowledge. Identifying the economy as universal criterion of evaluation has in fact re-established a sort of theology in the relation between learning and (economic) absolute truth. At the end of the twentieth century, the university crisis was exposed: modern humanism proved unable to cope with the networked Infosphere. The institution of the university, as we have known it in the age of modernity, was unfit to deal with networked intelligence and the humanist legacy was in need of a reformation. Techno-financial reason has taken charge of this reformation. Public education has been impoverished by the neoliberal ruling class: dismantled, precarized, and finally replaced with a system of market-driven recombination of fragmented skills and competences whose meaning escapes even the learner. Innovation is celebrated, but it is only allowed within the framework of the theological dogma of private profit and infinite growth.

Two different skills are involved in this process of exploitation of the invention-force. The first is the complex and concrete ability of the scientist, of the technician, of the semiotic worker: ability that deploys in an infinite range of special forms of knowledge. The second is the brutal ability of the investor, helped by the accountant, the lawyer and the gunman. Who is the winner, in the game of money? Obviously, the winner is the capitalist who knows nothing about such concrete matters as physics, chemistry, media, metallurgy, fashion or art, but knows everything about the art of the expropriation of another’s work and culture. The capitalist’s life has been devoted to the transformation of the infinite richness of knowledge into the infinite misery of money.

The Inconceivable Trauma In the second decade of the twenty-first century two different processes are operating with apparently unstoppable force: the first is a global civil war underway since 2001 and ramping up to a breathtaking pace in the year 2016; the second is the automation of cognitive activity, the penetration of AI devices into daily life and into the urban environment, paving the way to a neuro-totalitarian system. Both processes are actually under development, both appear inevitable. Brexit and Trump’s electoral victory marked a breakpoint in the history of neoliberal globalism. In the past century, we thought democracy and socialism had defeated nationalism. Wrong. Nationalism is back, thanks to the vengeance of the white working class, humiliated by neoliberal policies and betrayed by social reformists who have played into the hands of the financial dictatorship. This working-class revenge has unchained a wave of white racism that collides with the anger of people from colonized areas, apparent in Islamic religious fundamentalism, Duterte’s style of fascism, Hindu fundamentalism and Chinese authoritarianism. The result will be a long-lasting trauma, the effects of which cannot yet be estimated. We may witness the spread of barbarianism and violence, and the eventual breakdown of civilization to the point where what is human in the human race is obliterated. But this future has yet to be written. The trauma will not be a mere cultural breakdown: it will possibly evolve into a neuro-morphogenesis, the emergence of new cognitive abilities. The forms and meaning of the neuro-morphogenesis will be shaped by a therapeutic and aesthetic action. In the implications of the trauma there is the space for a culture of disentanglement for the emancipation of the inscribed possibility from the tangle of the automaton. The way out of the global civil war fuelled by white racism and fascist resentments will only be found in a raising of consciousness among the cognitive workers of the world. This process appears unattainable today because cognitive workers lack the potential for self-organization. Impotence is the present condition of cognitive workers, entangled in the neurototalitarian process of self-construction within the automaton. The trauma will transform the relation between emotional and cognitive dimensions. The direction of this transformation is not prescribed: it is the stake of the future game. Will the trauma disclose from the hidden folds of futurability the possibility of knowledge autonomy and of communist empathy among cognitive workers? Will the poets and the engineers find the energy to escape the salary superstition and develop the possibilities inscribed in knowledge and technology in a condition of autonomy? Or is the trauma going to provoke a collapse of unimaginable proportions? While I write the last pages of this book, a dark landscape is emerging, and to my perception and understanding the suicidal trends of the modern world seem unstoppable. However, what I see and what I know is far from the whole picture. What escapes my grasp, what I cannot see, what I cannot imagine, what I cannot even conceive is the means of escape.

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The Global Silicon Valley as Conflict and as Subject What is inconceivable today is an approach to techno-power based on social needs rather than on economic realities. At present cooperation among the cognitive workers in autonomy from capital accumulation is inconceivable. Cooperation is happening already in daily exchange among peer-to-peer producers, programmers and activists all around the world. The project for the next twenty years is to dismantle and reprogramme the meta-machine, creating a common consciousness and a common technical platform for the cognitive workers of the world. I am a reader and a great fan of Evgeny Morozov. But I also think that we should go beyond the critique of the techno-media corporate system and start a project of enquiry and self-organization for the cognitive workers who daily produce the global semio-economy. We should focus less on the system and more on the subjectivity that underlies the global semio-cycle. The worldwide, scattered sphere of production in which different cultures and social interests conflict I call the Global Silicon Valley (GSV). The Global Silicon Valley has to be seen as a dynamic sphere in which conflicts are continuously emerging, as the deterritorialized sphere in which millions of semio-workers are cooperating daily for the construction of the net-automaton. We should not see this sphere only as a homogeneous field of abstract interactions. It is also a living web of connections among workers who deal with different social conditions: high-wage corporate functionaries as well as precarious designers, engineers, artists and all the inglorious workers of the net. We must look at the Global Silicon Valley, the global semio-factory, the same way Lenin regarded the Putilov plant in 1917, the same way the Italian autonomists considered the Fiat Mirafiori factory in the ’70s: as the core of the production process, as the place where the maximal level of exploitation is exerted and where the highest transformative potency can be unchained. Although the GSV is under the control of a techno-elite that represents a small portion of the infinitely complex web of cooperation, we must create a common cultural and technological platform for the autonomy of the cognitarians of the world. Building a common consciousness and spreading the consciousness of a possible social solidarity among neuro-workers is the task for the next decade, and the ethical awakening of millions of engineers, artists and scientists is the only chance of averting a frightening regression, whose contours we are glimpsing already. January 2017

“Jim and I don’t debug well together. He asks too many questions that I can’t answer.”

West laughed. He made the sound mostly in his throat. It was a low and even noise. Odd in itself and oddly provoked, the kind of laughter that ghost stories inspire, it seemed to say, “Here’s something that’s not ordinary.” A snapshot taken of the cockpit in the afternoon shows West sitting in the stern. The dark shadow of a day’s growth of beard reveals that he passed adolescence some years ago, though just how many would be impossible to say. In fact, he is just forty. He wears glasses with flesh-colored rims, and a heavy gray sweater that must have given him long faithful service hangs loosely on his frame. He looks as if he must smell of wool. He looks thin, with a long narrow face that on a woman would be called horsey. A mane of brown hair, swept back behind his ears, reaches almost to his collar. His face is lifted, his lips pursed. He appears to be the person in command.

———

Paul Graham

Weird Languages

August 2021

When people say that in their experience all programming languages are basically equivalent, they're making a statement not about languages but about the kind of programming they've done.

99.5% of programming consists of gluing together calls to library functions. All popular languages are equally good at this. So one can easily spend one's whole career operating in the intersection of popular programming languages.

But the other .5% of programming is disproportionately interesting. If you want to learn what it consists of, the weirdness of weird languages is a good clue to follow.

Weird languages aren't weird by accident. Not the good ones, at least. The weirdness of the good ones usually implies the existence of some form of programming that's not just the usual gluing together of library calls.

A concrete example: Lisp macros. Lisp macros seem weird even to many Lisp programmers. They're not only not in the intersection of popular languages, but by their nature would be hard to implement properly in a language without turning it into a dialect of Lisp. And macros are definitely evidence of techniques that go beyond glue programming. For example, solving problems by first writing a language for problems of that type, and then writing your specific application in it. Nor is this all you can do with macros; it's just one region in a space of program-manipulating techniques that even now is far from fully explored.

So if you want to expand your concept of what programming can be, one way to do it is by learning weird languages. Pick a language that most programmers consider weird but whose median user is smart, and then focus on the differences between this language and the intersection of popular languages. What can you say in this language that would be impossibly inconvenient to say in others? In the process of learning how to say things you couldn't previously say, you'll probably be learning how to think things you couldn't previously think.

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I have little patience with those whose thinking is sloppy, small, or devoid of abstraction. And I’m not a joiner; I rebel against groups with “our beliefs”, especially when members must keep criticisms private, so as not to give ammunition to “them.”  I love to argue one on one, and common beliefs are not important for friendship — instead I value honesty and passion.

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All borrowed words, loaned from other language users

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Do you find it hard to summarize yourself in a few words? Me too.

But I love the above quote. I have a passion, a sacred quest, to understand everything, and to save the world. I am addicted to “viewquakes”, insights which dramatically change my world view. I loved science fiction as a child, and have studied physics, philosophy, artificial intelligence, economics, and political science — all fields full of such insights. Unfortunately, this also tempted me to leave subjects after mastering their major insights.