In defence of the unfinished future ⊗ Penchants of the polymaths

Two quick things on AI before I get to the features. There’s quite the hubbub right now in the francophone world about Thélyson Orélien’s multi-award-nominated C’était ça ou mourir (which I read this summer and found fantastic). Someone ran an AI detector on the text and claims it was written with an LLM at 94%. Beyond the fact that, even if he used AI, this seems like an outrageous number vs the acclaims he got. Skipping for now over the plagiarism claims that followed, and even if you haven’t heard of this. I’d like to draw your attention to one thing that is worth considering: “we” are training LLMs on a vast swath of human creations, pushing models to write, speak, and fake-think like humans. Then “we” use other LLMs to test human writing and accuse them of writing like LLMs, the models trained to sound human. We’re pressuring humans to prove they are human, because models accuse them of writing like models that are writing like humans.

Second thing, I spent part of the week creating little tools and a dashboard for myself, as well as summarising a bunch of PDF reports so I can glance at the summaries and get back to them as/if needed—you know, second brain things. All of that with LLMs. (Btw, Ollama’s cloud usage plans are surprisingly copious.) And yet, I turn around and read news about the whole field and I feel so, so, so tired. And thus, even though it’s imperfect and there were loads or credible articles about stochastic parrots, the second feature is about polymaths during the Islamic Golden Age. Because I like polymaths, history, and transdisciplinarity.

In defence of the unfinished future

Honor Harger, who led Singapore’s ArtScience Museum for years, writes on her blog that the future is losing its public authors. Her starting point is the demographer Anne Goujon’s concept of “dejuvenation,” the gradual loss of demographic, economic and political weight among the young in ageing societies. Precarious work, unaffordable housing and environmental anxiety make young people feel their futures are “structurally constrained,” and that feeling shapes their choices about work, civic life and children. Goujon suggests the scarcest resource of this century may be “the capacity to generate confidence in the future,” and Harger treats this as a challenge for anyone working on how the future enters public life. A framing I hadn’t seen before, is that she separates confidence from optimism—it’s usually hope v optimism. In her view, optimism is passive and expects events to resolve themselves. Confidence comes from understanding that the future is not fixed and that present choices have consequences. Imagination matters for the same reason: people who cannot picture an alternative to the present have trouble working towards one.

The stories people use to picture the future are the second part of the problem. Science fiction supplies much of that imagery, and its enduring works are inseparable from their politics. Harger cites the political theorist Ali Rıza Taşkale’s Aeon essay on “reactionary futurism” (featured in No.412), the way tech leaders keep the genre’s aesthetic authority and discard its ideas. Zuckerberg took the “metaverse” from Snow Crash, where it was a warning about a privatised, collapsed society, and turned it into an aspiration. Repetition narrows the field too. A century of dystopian cinema has made catastrophe easier to picture than meaningful change, and a world imagined as lost relieves people of the obligation to repair it. Harger’s approach is to widen the sources of future-thinking: Indigenous futurisms, Afrofuturism, Silkpunk, Spicepunk, and Asian philosophies in which parallel worlds and simulated realities are centuries old. These traditions propose futures that are plural and grounded in particular places and histories.

Read together, Goujon and Taşkale describe people losing their voice in the future along with control over the stories through which it is imagined. Harger’s case is that museums can “redistribute the capacity to imagine the future.” A forecast can be analysed, but an exhibition can be entered. 2219: Futures Imagined projected Singapore two centuries forward through “small futures,” such as a public housing flat adapted for food scarcity, and Another World Is Possible set dystopian cinema against climate infrastructures and Afrofuturist communities visitors could move through and debate. Inside such a world, people can ask whose values it reflects and who has agency in it. The future is already being shaped in government departments, laboratories, boardrooms and code. Confidence comes from recognising that it “remains unfinished” and can still be influenced.

The ability to picture ourselves somewhere different, living under different conditions and within different kinds of systems, is a form of agency. If we cannot imagine an alternative to the present, it becomes difficult to work towards one. […]

Science fiction doesn’t just anticipate technologies – it creates whole worlds around them. The most enduring works ask who owns these technologies, who controls them, how they alter human relationships, and what kinds of society they make possible. Their imagined futures are inseparable from their politics. […]

Many ideas that appear futuristic within Western science fiction have existed for centuries within Asian philosophies and spiritual traditions. Parallel universes, simulated realities, interdimensional travel, transcendence, sentient ecologies and the dissolution of linear time can also be found in Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Shintoism and the belief systems of Southeast Asia. […]

Museums have traditionally helped people interpret history, memory and culture. The future-oriented museums within the FORMS network widen that temporal horizon, creating spaces where the public can also encounter possibility.

Penchants of the polymaths

Mariam Sabri teaches the history of science in a liberal arts programme in Pakistan, where her students talk about disruption and employability and rarely about breadth. Her answer is to walk them through four scholars of classical Islamic science, al-Biruni, Alhazen, Avicenna and al-Khwarizmi, and what she wants them to take away is more specific than a nod to interdisciplinarity: the habit of testing one field’s assumptions against another’s. She also wants a model drawn from the Muslim world’s own traditions, instead of one imported from the Global North along with the compulsory entrepreneurship courses.

The stories are the best part, and a few details drew my attention. Al-Biruni, short of instruments, built his own sextants, which is how he could tell that the astronomer al-Khujandi’s much larger one sagged and skewed its reading of Earth’s tilt. Alhazen spent a decade under house arrest after he realised his plan to dam the Nile was doomed to fail and he feigned madness to escape the caliph. In that time he worked out that vision comes from light entering the eye (as opposed to rays emitted by the eyes, the then common theory), then went a step further, arguing that turning that light into perception takes inference, memory and comparison, an idea the West only articulated in the 19th century. Avicenna compressed Greek, Persian and Indian medicine into a Canon that European universities taught from for five centuries, and rewrote its lessons in verse so physicians could remember them. Al-Khwarizmi’s algebra began as a handbook for inheritance disputes, land surveys and canal digging, which gives Sabri my favourite line of the essay: “theory isn’t the opposite of practice; it’s what practice becomes once it’s generalised.”

An underlying thread I liked, especially for people from the West raised on Rome and the Greeks, is the repeated mentions of the circulation of knowledge between Arabia, Persia, and India. Scarcity, captivity and court patronage each play a part, but what the four shared was contact with other traditions, Indian astronomy, Greek science, Persian medicine, and the licence to argue with them. “Polymathy has never been a solitary pursuit,” she writes, “but one fed by contact across traditions.” For students heading into a world shaped by AI, climate disruption and political upheaval, I’d take that over another compulsory course on entrepreneurship.

It was where the study of Arabic grammar was founded; where al-Jahiz explored everything from zoology to theology; where the Ikhwan al-Safa – a clandestine brotherhood of scientist-philosophers – compiled a massive encyclopaedia that wove together mathematics, music and metaphysics. It was this cosmopolitan and bookish culture that shaped Alhazen. […]

His development of the intromission theory revealed another crucial ability: his critical thinking. His works are a testament to the fact that Muslim polymaths did not just consume, translate or replicate Greek knowledge. Rather, they critiqued and innovated. […]

Whether students endeavour to be scholars or entrepreneurs, they need to seek out eclectic experiences without a predetermined outcome. Alhazen’s combination of creativity and critical thinking under constraints led to the extraordinary achievements for which he is still remembered.

Theory itself is often the real barrier I see in the classroom, especially among students from geographically disadvantaged backgrounds who arrive well practised in applied knowledge but not in abstraction.

Futures, Fictions & Fabulations

• Beyond the Gaia-Borg dichotomy: imagining a second chance. “This essay examines the prevailing dichotomy between an ecologically oriented ‘Gaia’ and a technocratic ‘Borg’ future within contemporary discourse. It argues that this binary overlooks the pivotal role of human agency in fostering societal transformation and advocates for citizen agency and compassion as fundamental to achieving inclusive and sustainable futures.”
• Envisioning AI futures: science fiction, the imagination gap, and its political consequences. “Dystopian AI tropes, grounded in science fiction, are pervasive in popular culture, but the effects of these narratives on lay orientations toward socio-technological futures remain under-researched. The article distinguishes between imagination (what people can envision) and expectations (what they think is likely), and explores the influence of science fiction on both.”
• Timeline. “The broad contours of the future we face are widely understood. But the detail comes from projections, and these live in silos. What if we assemble the data to let it tell its own story?”

Algorithms, Automations & Augmentations

• Anthropic has set up a bio research lab for physical experiments. Stop us! Stop us! Our turbo-autocomplete is going to destroy the world! Oh and also, we’re building it a wet lab, toodles! “While it’s unclear what kind of work Anthropic is doing in the new lab, Kauderer-Abrams said he believes AI could fast-track the discovery of treatments for conditions previously thought to be too difficult to treat. It could, for instance, help speed up the development of complex and targeted therapies.”
• The current balance of power in open models. “We are living in a world where GLM-5.2 and Kimi K3, some of the latest, leading Chinese models, have enacted a step change in the commercial viability of open models — crossing a similar threshold in agentic capabilities that Anthropic’s Claude Code crossed in December of 2025.”
• Meta tests Muse AI agent calls that are actually made by humans in a call center. Jobs below the AI. “Once again, a core feature of a major piece of AI technology will actually just be people working in a call center, doing work that a company says AI is doing. It is not clear how often or when a call is routed to a so-called ‘human agent,’ and when a call is done exclusively by AI.”

Built, Biosphere & Breakthroughs

• Why Germany is building an ark for US climate data. “The operation aims to ensure that essential work performed by U.S. scientists for the next major United Nations climate assessment, due in 2029, cannot be meddled with or compromised by the administration of President Donald Trump.”
• How Indigenous Protected Areas became a vital way to protect nature in Australia. “These areas of land or sea Country are voluntarily dedicated by Traditional Owners to protect nature and cultural values and responsibilities. Once dedicated, an IPA becomes part of Australia’s National Reserve System—our network of protected areas. To protect the area, Indigenous rangers tackle invasive species and undertake cultural burning and many other tasks.”
• Beavers are having a moment. “Long considered a nuisance, these furry construction experts are finally being appreciated for their role in healthy ecosystems.”

Asides

• Human brain is two separate organs, Stanford Medicine-led research finds. Wait! What?! “New research led by Stanford Medicine reveals that what we call the brain is two distinct organs that evolved independently over hundreds of millions of years.”
• Microscopic universes come alive in Nikon’s Small World in Motion contest. “When people watch cilia beating, they immediately understand that something beautiful and important is happening inside us, I think this competition turns microscopy into a shared language.”
• The Soviets drilled the deepest hole ever. *“Since 2008, the very slender chasm has been bolted shut with a dinner-plate-sized steel cover that measures only about 9 inches across. But the hole it hides plunges down for more than 40,000 feet into the earth and took more than 20 years to dig. That’s deeper than the altitude at which most commercial airlines fly and deeper by about 20,000 feet than any other hole anywhere else on Earth.