Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon is the philosopher who haunts the AI age without having meant to. In the Novum Organum of 1620, he did two things that turned out to be, four centuries later, almost exact descriptions of machine learning: he catalogued the systematic distortions of the human understanding under the rubric of four Idols—the Tribe, the Cave, the Marketplace, and the Theatre—that map with uncomfortable precision onto the known failure modes of trained models; and he prescribed a method of building knowledge from instances rather than deducing it from axioms, which is the deep logic of every gradient descent algorithm now running on a GPU cluster. He also fused knowing with doing in the formulation that has governed technology ever since: human knowledge and human power meet in one. An AI is the most complete realization of that fusion ever built—knowledge that does not describe the world but operates on it,