Over the past year, the Contraptions club has been reading through history—from Giordano Bruno and Montaigne to Spinoza, Adam Smith, and Hume. We are now using using Venkatesh Rao’s Divergence Machine framework as a lens to make sense of the modern world.
For context, Venkat posits that human history operates through massive “world machines”. The “modernity machine” was constructed around 1200 and operated at a steady plateau of capability from 1600 to 2000. It is now in a state of rapid, partially scheduled disassembly. In its place, the “divergence machine” was constructed around 1600 and has been operating in fully deployed mode for about 25 years.
Looking at this transition through the philosophers we’ve studied, my feeling is that over the centuries, we’ve witnessed a gradual peeling back of the layers of imagination that were once heavily layered on top of nature. We can map this peeling back directly to Rao’s divergence concepts.
The Death of “Fiat Progress”
For a long time, humanity operated under what Rao calls Fiat Progress—an uncontroversial and relatively naive notion of increasing well-being yoked to fiat idealism, handed down by religious leaders and the state. Successive philosophers gradually peeled this back. Thinkers like Spinoza and Hume abandoned these theological conceits to focus purely on reality.
David Hume: The First Philosopher of the AI Age
To really understand where we are today, we have to look closely at David Hume, the “original philosopher of the AI age”. He went farther than anyone in abandoning complex theories of causation in favor of near-pure phenomenology. While his contemporaries were tempted to build a model clockwork universes (even an off Utopia), Hume was “only willing to treat the log files of reality as real”. He recognized that everything else—including the grand narratives, religions, and laws we impose on the world—were made up by people.
The Industrial Hangover and Baudrillard
The Industrial Revolution mass-produced everything and turned humans into functional, legible parts of a centralized system. The modernity machine manufactured and projected convergent canonicity — a homogenizing worldview imposed from above. This brings me to the philosopher Jean Baudrillard: in the past, technology was personalized for us; today, we pick technology and objects to show who we are, actively constructing a consumer identity. In the context of Rao’s framework, we are clinging to this constructed identity to remain legible to a modernity machine system that is exhibiting a kind of “zombie persistence”.
AI and the Final Layer of Identity
Finally, to you, the modern knowledge worker. Thus far, we’ve managed to stand out due to our specific know-how. But AI operates exactly like Hume’s philosophy: it doesn’t care about the grand narrative of who you are; it simply processes our prompts, the raw log files of our know-how. With AI automating this cognitive labor, we stand to lose that very last layer of the fiction of identity. Stripped of the work that makes us legible to the system, we are left with the cheery feeling of ontological dread.
Moving Forward: From Flexibility to Plasticity
The final move of divergence: exposing the raw abilities of our brains. To understand how the human behind the identity moves forward, we can look to philosopher Catherine Malabou’s distinction between the flexibility and plasticity of the brain.
- Flexibility is simply the taking of forms due to external forces; it is plasticity without its genius.
- Plasticity, on the other hand, is the active giving and taking of forms.
We are moving from a flexible brain (as externally viewed)—which bent to operate within a set, centralized system—to an externalization of the brain’s pure plasticity. In the divergence machine era, we must learn to diverge moment to moment, actively taking and giving form to ideas and objects without relying on a centralized system to tell us what those forms mean.
Thus far, we were able to deal with our plasticity because we took fairly stable forms and gave similar forms repeatedly—namely, through the daily routines of our jobs. With AI, we are shorn of the comforting feedback loop from that repetitive giving of form. With AI, our raw genius is left bare. There isn’t much of external anything to situate our identities. We are no longer required to be a flexible pliant cog in a dying machine. Instead, we are entering an era where we will diverge not just from each other, but even from our immediate past selves, very quickly.
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