Hey, I'm Ken Burns. For our series of UNUM Chats focused on Leonardo da Vinci, I'm excited to speak with author Kevin Roose. Kevin writes about the technologies that influence our lives, our culture, our society. He's covered technology for more than a decade, and he's been a columnist at The New York Times since 2017. He's written three books, including the latest, "Future Proof: Survival Guide for Humans in the Age of Artificial Intelligence." Welcome, Kevin, to our chat.
So happy to have you having me.
That's great. Well, we'll start by watching a short clip from our Leonardo da Vinci film. This clip is from the second part of the film, and a longer section focused on Leonardo's amazing observations into gravity, water, the atmosphere, and more. The first voice you'll hear is an actor, Adrienne Hodge, reading Leonardo's words, which have thankfully survived in his many manuscripts, as he writes about his approach to his scientific experiments. Let's play the clip and have a conversation on the other side.
Before going any further, I shall do some experiments, because I intend to first produce the experience and then use reason to prove why the experience is forced to act that way. And this is the true rule whereby those who investigate natural effects must proceed. And although nature begins with the cause and ends in experience, we must proceed in the opposite sense. In other words, starting from experience and using that to investigate the cause. Though Muslim scientists in the Middle East have long been testing their theories with experiments, most natural philosophers in Europe continue to follow the example of Aristotle, whose scientific conclusions have relied solely on observation. Leonardo comes of age at a time when the first stirrings of the scientific revolution were just being felt.
It progressed by narrowing the problems that it was asking itself. Leonardo's mind is still elsewhere. He's trying to think, what if you looked at it all at once? How would you solve it? But he has the kind of restless curiosity of intellect and the perpetual dissatisfaction with the received solution, which are core kind of the Promethean fire of the scientific revolution. So if we see Leonardo helping to set alight that great adventure, I don't think we're wrong. His early work, definitely. His writings are influenced by Aristotle. But as he became more of a scientist, you could see that his approach was more of an analytical approach, a combination, a hybrid of experiments and, you know, theory. Force arises from the earth in abundance. It is the child of physical motion and the grandchild of spiritual motion, and the mother and the origin of gravity. Gravity is limited to the elements of water and earth, but this force is unlimited and it could be used to move infinite worlds, if instruments could be made by which the force could be generated.
So, Kevin, what did you think? I'd love to just start with your reaction, plain and simple.
Very cool. I just, I love these writings, and I love that you've sort of brought them back and animated them in this way. And I just, I've always been obsessed with this period of the Renaissance, because I think it was just such an interesting period in our history. Obviously you had the scientific revolution going on, but there was also sort of this fusing of all of these disparate fields of art and philosophy and science, and sometimes, as in Leonardo's case, being practiced by the same people. I think today we tend to sort of think about, you know, what's going on in tech as being very different from what's going on in art or film or creative enterprises. And you either, you're a STEM major or you're an art major, and there's not sort of that many areas, but I think we're starting to see some convergence between those things too. So I think it's just a really interesting period. I've always been interested in that period, and I'm so glad to have had the opportunity to watch the film.
Well, thank you. You know, this is also made by Sarah Burns and David McMahon. And I think our idea was to try to explode our own notions of siloing people, because Leonardo certainly didn't. Every artistic gesture he made was a scientific one at the same time, and vice versa. The key word is what you said, fusing it. And I love this idea that we could sort of lose the artificial barriers that convenience and commerce sort of sets up, so that we can, you know, describe something. And this clip, you know, as many do, situates Leonardo at the beginning of the scientific revolution. And we're in the midst of another technological revolution right now. Do you see a connection between now and the Renaissance of Leonardo's time, a kind of sense of energy and possibility? I mean, you're suggesting that maybe we are losing some of these kind of superficial labels in favor of a more polymath and more integrated, as Leonardo always was, trying to find that kind of string theory that explained everything.
Yeah, I think there is so much energy in the tech industry and in Silicon Valley right now around sort of questioning things from their most basic assumptions. You know, what is money? That was sort of the animating question behind the crypto revolution that happened just in the last decade or so. There are obviously questions around AI and sort of what is cognition? What is intelligence? What is the, you know, what is the human mind, and can we build that into a machine? You know, Leonardo was a classic example of what today you might call a systems thinker or a first principles thinker. Those are terms that a lot of engineers in Silicon Valley, tech people, use to basically describe people who are looking at the problems under the problems. You know, if you're looking at electric cars, you really want to go down to the level of the battery and sort of examine the physics of that and how you can improve it. These are the kinds of questions that a lot of people in tech are obsessed with. And so I think he was a very good early example of a systems thinker or a first principles thinker who was never sort of satisfied with an easy explanation, who wanted to understand all of the things that went into it, whether it was, you know, studying the flight patterns of birds to try to make his own mechanical flying contraptions, without sort of always trying to get to the lowest level of the problem possible.
You know, I really love what Adam Gopnik says, you know, that he has this kind of Promethean fire, this sort of new thing burning in him. And it's so interesting that so many of his things having to do with anatomy, obviously having to do with man-powered flight and so many other things, aren't going to be provable or doable for another 500 years. But he had them, and we're using his designs. Are there contemporary tech innovators today, you think, who embody this spirit, this different kind of thinking, the thinking two or three layers down to elemental basic questions about things?
