Big change is coming—AI, politics, failing institutions. We can’t stop it, but we can shape it. The author’s advice: don’t burn it all down. Keep what works. Have a “conservative revolution” like America’s, not France’s. Beethoven learned the old rules before he broke them, and we should do the same.
What matters most is technology that helps people be their best selves. Humanism. Abundance. No slop, no propping up dead institutions, and no giving up control of the future.
But values don’t survive on their own—they need containers. The Union League. The Freemasons. Universities built with railroad money. Groups where the new elite can meet, agree on goals, and pass things down. We’ll need new ones.
It’s refreshing to see someone put liberal humanist values under AI discourse. Most people either panic or go full techno-optimist, but this author says: be humble. You can’t write laws for a world you don’t understand yet. Just train good people and build flexible containers.
The Tocqueville connection feels right—voluntary associations are how democracies work without the state running everything.
One question he doesn’t answer: where are today’s Stanfords? Tech billionaires fund fellowships and foundations, but nothing built to last centuries. Maybe “move fast and break things” kills the instinct to build in stone.
“I do not assign messianic or eschatological significance to AI, but there is still something appropriate about waiting hopefully, in the season of Advent, for momentous and incomprehensible change.”
“We don’t know what form the future will take, so we shouldn’t presume to outline the exact rules that will govern it. We should instead create the preconditions for success.”
“If we are to have a revolution, perhaps we can have a conservative one, that preserves the best aspects of the tradition it replaces.”
“I believe in technology that helps good people live good lives, according to the standards of their best selves.”
“We’ll likely need similar institutions again: ones that encourage class identification and the pursuit of common goals.”