michael_nielsen

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?

Some examples: the late Marvin Minsky's utterly extraordinary list of students and collaborators: https://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/people.html … (from Ivan Sutherland to Terry Winograd to Eric Drexler to...)

Murray Gell-Mann's extraordinary list of proteges include Ken Wilson, John Schwartz, Jim Hartle, and, in a way, the whole Santa Fe Institute.

Stewart Brand saw so much early: Engelbart & human augmentation; the Merry Pranksters, Ken Kesey; the population bomb (he worked with Ehrlich); Xerox PARC; the Well (one of the first online communities); the Whole Earth Catalog; and so much else: http://sb.longnow.org/SB_homepage/Home.html …

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.