In discussion on an esoteric forum a few months ago, I posted at length about something I had heard Nick Land mention during his visit to San Francisco: the Anglo tradition contra the Franco tradition.
This distinction is central to understanding the wildfire that is sweeping through 'engineering' right now, and because 'engineering' is having its first and only world-historical wave of impact since the Manhattan project, it's also central to understanding the history that is presently unfolding.
To start, a quote from the literally prophetic Meltdown:
Where formalist AI is incremental and progressive, caged in the pre-specified data-bases and processing routines of expert systems, connectionist or antiformalist AI is explosive and opportunistic: engineering time. It breaks out nonlocally across intelligenic networks that are technical but no longer technological, since they elude both theory dependency and behavioural predictability. No one knows what to expect. The Turing-cops have to model net-sentience irruption as ultimate nuclear accident: core meltdown, loss of control, soft-autoreplication feeding regeneratively into social fission, trashed meat all over the place. Reason enough for anxiety, even without hardware development about to go critical.
Land referred to the formalist model from above as Franco and the connectionist as Anglo, which I find very useful as they stand, but both deserve a bit more elucidation.
In the Anglo tradition, the logos is applied to the problem of defining structured rulesets which (hopefully) lead to spontaneous emergence of certain desired phenomena given enough scale. Vitalik Buterin can be seen as a recent high priest of this tradition with 'protocol engineering'. The 'blockchain' and 'smart contract' are two of the most Anglo things imaginable.
In the Franco tradition, the logos is applied to the problem of defining structured mechanics which totally specify how some function takes inputs to outputs. Elon can be seen as the best to ever do it. The toy example in my head is a mechanical watch with a tourbillon or some other nonsense.
Both engineering traditions have their merits, but the Franco is fundamentally limited by the human. You can apply a million PhDs to some problem but monkey coordination is asymptotically lossy and the integration of subsystems gets fragile (something something Tower of Babel). It's gotten us pretty far and certainly has a lot of mileage left, but: the Anglo thing ends up being more powerful because it bears structural similarity to reality and defers a lot of work to it (the God of Nature is a structured ruleset we call physics and reality is Its unfolding). The God of Nature's unfolding process really seems to want to keep unfolding, and does so no matter how hard we try to stop it. The Anglo engineer asks: why not use this curious fact (simplistically referred to as 'time') as part of the engineering toolbox? Set out some rules, and let Nature do the work for us.
(As an aside, complexity theory is the natural mathematical framework for the Anglo method. The extant scientific (neé natural philosophical) order has forced it into an uncomfortable rut because it explodes Boolean Truth into Probabilistic Truth.)
Bringing the 'God of Nature, or Nature,' usefully rendered as 'Gnon', into the discussion here has extremely wide-ranging implications, and I was reminded of those implications by an interesting recent result from Tuomo Kiiskinen.
The point Tuomo is making is that if you think organisms are matter compilers operating 'close to the atoms', the genome drastically underspecifies the organism. The many miraculous results of the Levin Lab at Tufts strengthen the implicit perspective here, namely: Life is relying on the underlying structure of physical law to help with morphogenesis.
In other words, Life is an engineer from the Anglo tradition. To put it another way, Anglo engineering has the mandate of heaven.
The bitter lesson of Richard Sutton harmonizes with this Anglosupremacy, and the tremendous success of the 'transformer + scaling law' approach that characterizes the rise of OpenAI and Anthropic also substantiates the claim. There is a truly astounding amount more to say about this, and under a complete understanding, it amounts to nothing short of a theology.
Note to the reader: I've been putting my intellectual capacity into various hidden and anonymous venues for the past few years, but that period has come to a close. I hope you will enjoy my posting on main.