PERSON

Buckminster Fuller

The American architect, inventor, and self-described comprehensivist who spent his life insisting that technology’s deepest direction was to do more and more with less and less, predicted that the computer would make every human specialist obsolete, coined “ephemeralization,” “Spaceship Earth,” and “livingry vs. killingry,” and whose utopia-or-oblivion binary is the most accurate framing of the AI fork humanity is now entering.

Buckminster Fuller was not a computer scientist. He was an architect with no degree, an inventor who failed at business, a man who once stood at the edge of Lake Michigan contemplating suicide and decided instead to conduct what he called “an experiment to discover what a single individual could contribute to changing the world.” He died in 1983, before any system outside a few laboratories had learned to hold a conversation. And yet the vocabulary he spent fifty years assembling—ephemeralization, Spaceship Earth, livingry versus killingry, comprehensive anticipatory design science, the trim tab—describes artificial intelligence more exactly than most of what is written about it today. He gave us the one question that cuts beneath every capability debate: not what can the machine do, but which direction is it

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