Who in the world has super taste, a feel for and way of picking subjects that, decades in the future, will seem prescient, as though they had a line on the future?
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More people: I can make a case for George Church, Jane Jacobs, Eric Drexler, and many others. In each case they saw multiple things, often in (supposedly) unconnected disciplines, decades ahead of the mainstream.
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Who else can you think of? What did they see, decades before almost everyone else?
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More good examples: John Wheeler, Hal Abelson (suggested by
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Just a clarification: I mean people who are right over and over again. Not just that they founded a field, but rather that they were a key enabler in the early days of many, many fields. Eg, Minsky's proteges helped found perhaps a dozen or more distinct fields or subfields.
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To reiterate: lots of people are mentioning field founders. Which is great, but not the question. The question is: who helped enable new fields to emerge, over & over & over & over again. Eg, I can name a dozen fields or subfields for Minsky.
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“If I have not seen as far as others, it is because giants were standing on my shoulders.” —Hal Abelson
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Ah, Abelson is a great example! He was importantly right about Papert, GPL, Creative Commons, open science, Scheme, open source biology, and a dozen other things. Amazing taste!
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I think Neal Stephenson fits comfortably in this category. Snow Crash and The Diamond Age hit a bunch of stuff correctly, although not everything, for sure.
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Interesting example. Vernor Vinge is another, I think.
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Geoffrey Hinton is the most obvious person missing from your list right now.
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He doesn't really fit the criteria. He only ever worked in one field. And, in any case, he came to neural nets decades after people like Minsky and Rosenblatt et al
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Seems like a person has a career/personality that has allowed them to have a portfolio of tastes. Vs just 1 or 2 In other disciplines, someone like
@pmarca, or music - Rick Rubin.Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
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