The Invention of Judgment

Something unprecedented happened in Western Europe between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries: innovation became normal. Landes called this 'the invention of invention' — not any single discovery but the creation of a system for producing discoveries: the research university, the scientific journal, the patent system, the culture of priority, the apprenticeship networks, the correspondence networks that connected natural philosophers across borders. Each component was individually unremarkable; what was new was the system. The result was compounding: each generation inherited the discoveries of the previous generation, added its own, and passed the accumulated total forward. The AI age requires an equivalent institutional innovation — the invention of judgment — the creation of infrastructure that produces good AI direction reliably across populations, rather than depending on individual discipline that does not scale.