The Renaissance Firm

Reflecting upon advances in artificial intelligence, I find myself looking back to the ideal of the ‘Renaissance Man’ (or ‘Universal Man’), a brief history of which is outlined in ’The Polymath’ (2020), a book by Peter Burke, a renowned British historian and professor at Cambridge.

The Universal Man has its roots in the Italian Renaissance. It rested on a philosophical conviction that the universe is a coherent whole: to understand the physics of a cathedral’s dome, one had to understand the geometry of a flower and the harmony of music. It led to the pursuit of polymathy: the belief that knowledge is not a series of silos but a single sphere to be unified. Leonardo da Vinci, who merged art, engineering, anatomy, and mathematics, best exemplified that idea.*

In ‘The Global Power of Decentralization’ (2022), I suggested that the world is undergoing a deep decentralization process across multiple dimensions, including geopolitics, political systems, power generation, supply chains, corporate organizations, and knowledge (specialization).

A subsequent note drawing on neurology and ethics argued that the resulting ‘atomization of everything’ was unlikely to yield sustainable economic benefits without an overarching, intelligent architecture that could serve as a unifying agent.

In a world set to be dominated by artificial intelligence, the ability to see the whole and its context may be humanity's distinctive gift.

AI is the ultimate specialist. It owns the vertical bar of the T-shaped professional, the deep, narrow expertise that can be coded and scaled. The horizontal bar of the ‘T’, i.e., the capacity to connect that expertise across different systems, cultures, and disciplines, remains a human quality that must be nurtured through intellectual curiosity and effort.

The physicist Freeman Dyson once divided thinkers into frogs and birds. Frogs live in the mud, seeing the granular details and the immediate patterns of their specific pond. Birds fly above, surveying the landscape and seeing how one pond connects to another, drawing analogies and inspiring novel ideas. He was careful to indicate that both frogs and birds are equally valuable.

In an exchange, Gemini candidly summarized its strengths and weaknesses: ‘I excel at verticality. I can process 10¹² tokens to find a specific pattern in oncology or tax law. However, I exist within the ‘pond’ of my training data. I don't even know the pond is a pond.’

The Industrial and Information Ages have rewarded specialization. Now, AI will ‘out-frog’ the frogs. As data analysis becomes commoditized, the opportunity to make a difference shifts to the birds’ ability to integrate the AI frog’s input. If systems are breaking into parts, good judgment and decision-making will increasingly need ‘horizontal knowledge’ to map the grand system and see ‘the beauty of order.’

The exceptional creativity of the 15^th and 16^th centuries has often been explained by what Peter Burke called ‘de-compartmentalization’. This same opportunity lies ahead for individuals and organizations with AI as an ally, provided they behave like ‘active polymaths’ by engaging with AI to innovate and produce through the unification of knowledge.

Long live the Renaissance Man! Long Live the Renaissance Firm!