This series examines the economic, epistemic, and geopolitical consequences of the AGI transition, using history as method, not metaphor.
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, scaling curves, or utility functions and reduce the past to rhetorical garnish. They use the Manhattan Project, the Industrial Revolution, Luddites, electricity, and even biological evolution as casual metaphors instead of frameworks for causal analysis.
This is unfortunate, because taking history seriously yields prior knowledge — knowledge of prior eras, and priors to discern between the imaginable and the plausible.
After all, historical records and texts 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, prior knowledge can illuminate the past, present, and future of AI. From the engineering breakthroughs that have advanced the field, to the competitive logic currently transforming frontier labs and chip makers. From the institutions that shaped labor and productivity shocks centuries ago, to the political economy fueling today’s robotics boom.
Prior knowledge can discipline even our theoretical inquiries into machine intelligence. It helps us to think more clearly about how trade, comparative advantage, and the perimeter of viable markets change in character over the long run. The historical method itself offers LLMs ways to reason causally about a world they access through text alone, while Tokugawa aristocratic culture might carry wisdom for living in a world of societal stasis and minimal work.
I believe that prior knowledge and the historical method allow us to make sense of the AGI transition much in the same way we made sense of our previous transition into modernity.
Given the magnitude of this transformation, I have built this site as a research program in motion. Each essay can stand alone, and each section — Frontiers in Motion, Exit and Distribution, The Wage Parenthesis, Machine Supremacy, Historical Inverse Inference, and The Aristocrats — will fill in over time. Welcome, and start with whatever question brought you here.
Manny