PERSON
Jared Diamond
The evolutionary biologist who spent fifty years asking why some societies facing existential challenges adapt and survive while others, facing comparable or lesser threats, fail to adapt and collapse—and whose answer, grounded in dozens of case studies from Norse Greenland to Easter Island, is simultaneously the most rigorous and the most uncomfortable diagnostic framework for the AI transition.
Jared Diamond is the scientist of civilizational choice. In 1984 he stood before the ruins of a Norse cathedral in Greenland and began asking the question that would define his career: why did the Norse colony survive for nearly five hundred years and then vanish completely, leaving the ruins of their churches and the bones of their last cattle, in an environment where the Inuit—occupying the same landscape at the same time—were flourishing? His answer, developed across Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997), Collapse (2005), and The World Until Yesterday (2012), is structural rather than moral: the Norse knew what the Inuit were doing. They could see the kayaks, the toggling harpoons, the techniques for hunting ringed seals through winter ice. They chose not to adopt them—not from stupidity or malice, but because adoption would have required abandoning the
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