This series examines the economic, epistemic, and geopolitical consequences of the AGI transition. It brings centuries of prior knowledge to bear on a future without precedent.
Manny Rincon-Cruz
Taipei · July 17, 2026
To see the future we must first look to the past.
Accelerationists and Doomers disagree about almost everything except their method. Both camps reason from abstract theory, reading off the future from scaling curves or utility functions. This reduces the past to rhetorical garnish — the Manhattan Project, the Industrial Revolution, Luddites, electricity, and even biological evolution are as casual metaphors instead of causal analysis.
In contrast, actually studying history yields prior knowledge — knowledge of prior eras, and priors to discern between the imaginable and the plausible.
Historical texts and records are downstream of the world that produced them — they are evidence of the phenomena of the world just as much as neutrinos, background radiation, or the variation of old growth forest tree rings.
For this reason, carefully deployed prior knowledge can reveal much about the past, present, and future of AI. From the engineering and intellectual breakthroughs that have advanced the field, to the competitive logic transforming the business models of frontier labs and chip makers. From the institutional forces that shaped the effects of millennia-old labor and productivity shocks, to the political economy fueling today’s boom in machine and robot manufacturing. From the historical methods that might allow LLMs to better reason about a world they access through text alone, to the wisdom that Tokugawa aristocratic culture offers for living in a world of societal stasis and minimal work. Prior knowledge can discipline even thought experiments about the economic consequences of AGI and the policies required to manage its diffusion, including how we should think about trade, comparative advantage, and the perimeter of viable markets.
My hope is that historical knowledge and the historical method can allow us to make sense of the AGI transition the same way we have made sense of our previous transition into the modern world.
This site is a research program in motion. Each essay stands alone. Each section — The Moving Frontier, Exit and Distribution, The Wage Parenthesis, Machine Supremacy, Historical Inverse Inference, and The Aristocrats — will fill in over time. Some conclusions will change if the historical evidence does. Start with whatever question brought you here.
Manny