- Hey, I am Ken Burns for our series of Unum Chats focused on Leonardo da Vinci.

I'm excited to speak with other Kevin Rus.

Kevin writes about the technologies that influence our lives, our culture, our society.

He's covered technology for more than a decade, and he is been a columnist at the New York Times since 2017.

He's written three books, including the latest Future Proof Survival Guide for Humans in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.

Welcome, Kevin, to our Unum Chat.

So happy to have you.

Thanks much for having me.

That's great.

Well, we'll start by watching a short clip from our Leonardo da Vinci film.

This clip is from a second part of the film and a longer section focused on Leonardo's amazing observations into gravity, water, the atmosphere and more.

The first voice you'll hear is an actor Adriano Giannini reading Leonardo's words, which have thankfully survived in as many manuscripts as he writes about his approach to his scientific experiments.

Let's play the clip and have a conversation on the other side.

- Before going any further, I shall do some experiments because I intend to first produce the experience and then use reason to prove why the experience is forced to act that way.

And this is the true rule whereby those who investigate natural effects must proceed.

And although nature begins with the cause and ends in experience, we must proceed in the opposite sense.

In other words, starting from experience and using that to investigate the cause.

- Though Muslim scientists in the Middle East had long been testing their theories with experiments, most natural philosophers in Europe continue to follow the example of Aristotle whose scientific conclusions had relied solely on observation.

- Leonardo comes of age at a time when the first stirrings of scientific revolution was just being felt it progressed by narrowing the problems that it was asking itself.

Leonardo's mind is still elsewhere.

He's trying to think, what if you looked at it all at once, how would you solve it?

But he has the kind of restless curiosity of intellect and the perpetual dissatisfaction with the received solution, which are core kind of the Promethean fire of the scientific revolution.

So if we see Leonardo helping to set a light, that great adventure, I don't think we're wrong.

- His early work, definitely his writings are influenced by Aristotle.

But as he aged, he became more of the scientist.

You could see that his approach was more of a analytical approach, combination of a hybrid of experiments and, you know, theory - Force arises from the earth or abundance.

It is the child of physical motion and the grandchild of spiritual motion and the mother and origin of gravity.

Gravity is limited to the elements of water and earth, but this force is unlimited, and it could be used to move infinite worlds if instruments could be made by which the force could be generated.

- So Kevin, what did you think?

I'd love to just start with your reaction, plain and simple.

- Very cool.

I just, I love these writings and I love that you've sort of brought them back and, and, and animated them in this way.

And I just, I've always been obsessed with this period of, of the Renaissance because I think it was just such an interesting period in our history.

Obviously you had the scientific revolution going on, but there was also sort of this, this fusing of all of these disparate fields of art and philosophy and science, and sometimes, as in Leonardo's case, being practiced by the same people.

I think today we tend to sort of think about, you know, what's going on in tech as being very different from what's going on in art or film or creative enterprises.

And you, either you're a stem major or you're an art major, and there's not sort of that many areas, but I I think we're starting to see some, some convergence between those things too.

So I, I think it's just a really interesting period.

I've always been interested in that period and I'm, I'm so glad to have had the opportunity to watch the film.

- Well, thank you.

You know, this is also made by Sarah Burns and David McMahon, and I think our idea was to try to explode our own notions of in siloing people, because Leonardo certainly didn't, he every artistic, you know, every artistic gesture he made was a scientific one at the same time, and vice versa.

The key word is what you said, fusing it.

And I love this idea that we could sort of lose the artificial barriers that convenience and commerce sorts of sets up so that we can, you know, describe something.

And this clip, you know, as many do situates Leonardo at the beginning of the scientific revolution, and we're in the midst of another technological revolution right now.

Do you see a connection between now and the Renaissance of Leonardo's time, a kind of sense of energy and possibility?

I mean, you're suggesting that maybe we are losing some of these kind of superficial labels in favor of, of a more polymath and more integrated, as Leonardo always was trying to find that kind of string theory that explained everything.

- Yeah, I think there's so much energy in, in the tech industry and in Silicon Valley right now around sort of questioning things from their most basic assumptions.

You know, what is money?

That was sort of the animating question behind the crypto revolution that happened just in the last decade or so.

There are obviously questions around AI and sort of what is cognition, what is intelligence?

What is the, you know, what is the human mind and can we build that into a machine?

You know, Leonardo was a, a classic example of what today you might call a, a systems thinker or a first principles thinker.

Those are terms that are a lot of engineers and Silicon Valley tech people use to basically describe people who are looking at the problems under the problems.

You know, if you're looking at electric cars, you really wanna go down to the level of the battery and sort of examine the physics of that and how you can improve it.

These are the kinds of questions that a lot of people in tech are obsessed with.

And so I think he was a, a very good early example of a systems thinker or a first principles thinker who was never sort of satisfied with an easy explanation, who wanted to understand all of the things that went into it, whether it was, you know, studying the flight patterns of birds to try to make his own mechanical flying contraptions.

He was sort of always trying to get to the lowest level of, of the, of the problem possible.

- You know, I I I really love what Adam Gottner says, you know, that he has this kind of promethean fire, this sort of new thing burning in him.

And it's so interesting that so many of his things having to do with anatomy, obviously having to do with man powered flight and so many other things aren't going to be provable or doable for another 500 years.

But he, he had 'em, he and, and we're using his designs.

Are there contemporary tech innovators today you think, who embody this spirit, this different kind of thinking to thinking two or three layers down to elemental basic questions about things?

Y - Yeah, I mean, the classic example that I'm sure you know, people would bring up is Elon Musk, who has, you know, many different interests.

He was not a sort of modern, he is not a modern day Leonardo da Vinci, I don't think.

He doesn't have the kind of artist, poet, philosopher stuff down as well as Leonardo did.

And he's got his own shortcomings and problems, but I think he is the kind of, I think his, his ambition is, is larger than a lot of people in the tech industry.

I would also point to people who are not as well known, people like Jennifer Doudna, who's one of the pioneers of CRISPR gene editing technology, who is someone who is, who's also been sort of pushing the boundaries of scientific progress.

And then I meet a lot of people in the AI industry who are working to make these, these language models that can talk and, and, and behave and think a lot like humans.

They are, they are not just building a gadget.

They are, they believe they are doing something fundamental in the history of technology that will ultimately be as consequential as anything that has come before it.

So I, I do see that ambition and that sort of drive for progress a lot, especially in, in the AI industry today.

- Well, let's stay in ai so you know so much about it.

How, if at all, can we apply Leonardo's forward thinking approach to address technological challenges that may potentially arise with this rapidly growing phenomenon?

And of course, every other day it's doomsday every other day it's paradise and, and in between it's both.

How, how do we, we take that kind of spirit of his restlessness, his his ability, thanks to the Renaissance, to sort of take traditional western observation and, and fuse it with more eastern Muslim experimentation and, and do the things he did and have that kind of restless intelligence and, and have the el have that the steam within his stem?

- Yeah, I mean, I think that there are a couple answers here.

One is, you know, we, I think we have to learn from his emphasis on experimentation as you just described.

He was a, a rigorous pester of products.

He wanted to make sure he knew what would happen to them once they were out in the world.

I see a lot of companies today just kind of building things and putting them out and letting, letting us be the Guinea pigs, right.

Testing them on society.

And I think that's really dangerous and, and really unwise.

But I also think that his style of sort of interdisciplinary thinking is something that we should emulate today because the, the problems with technology when they arise, they're usually not because of the technology, right?

They're because of something in society, something about the way that the technology causes us to behave or act.

It, it is often a failure of imagination and of of creative thinking at the tech companies that leads them to be surprised by how their products end up being used out in the world.

And, you know, Leonardo was above all a humanist.

He believed that technology should serve humans.

And I think that's something we really need to keep in mind.

And, and maybe it's bringing together people from different disciplines, artists and philosophers and engineers and scientists to all sort of look at this technology and, and how we can sort of make it work for all of humanity together.

- Yeah.

You know, I've, I've run in over the course of my professional life with, you know, executives in industry lamenting all of these newly minted MBAs that don't know anything about civics, that don't know how to write a letter, that don't know comparative religion, that don't know history, that don't know the kind of stuff.

People who are working to advance stem education continually come back or get stopped when they're reminded that the, the steam part, it is important in your book, future Proof, you discuss skills that machines can't replace.

How do you think Leonardo's multidisciplinary as you, as you are suggesting talents align with these future proof human skills?

What, what, what, what do we need to resurrect from him or save from him or remind ourselves, and what do we have to do practically today to make sure that the, in this case, the technological tale of AI isn't wagging the dog?

- Yeah, I think, you know, there's a, there's a concept that social scientists call combinatorial creativity that I think about a lot When I think about what is going to be useful and valuable in the future when AI can do a lot of people's parts of their jobs much better and faster and cheaper than, than any human.

I think that, you know, one of the skills that will be important is being able to take something from one discipline and apply it in another to have these multiple overlapping skill sets that can, you know, give you a, he a little bit of a hedge.

If, you know, one part of your job gets automated by ai, maybe there's a different skillset that you have that you can bring to a problem that'll help you sort of prevent yourself from becoming obsolete.

But also, I think this is a really undervalued skill in business, in technology in most industries, is sort of the, the people who are able to combine things from different parts of their lives.

You know, Steve Jobs used to say at Apple that, that their success was because they, they married the liberal arts and technology, right?

They were not just building gadgets, they were also thinking about the, the human users of those gadgets and how it could improve their lives.

And that's a kind of combinatorial creativity that he possessed in spades and that that animated apple and made it so successful.

But I see less of that in today's tech industry.

Things have become much more siloed.

And so I think we, we need to sort of develop these skills of synthesis, of combining things.

And then I think another skill that he had that doesn't often get talked about much is that he, he was an empathetic and well liked person.

You know, he was not one of these, these jerks who's just kind of these brilliant jerks.

He was very good at cultivating patrons and collaborators and supporters.

He was, you know, he had these kind of, what we would call soft skills that helped him, in addition to being brilliant at all the, the, the technical stuff that he was, he was brilliant at, that enabled him to sort of build a movement and a career for himself.

And so I think that is the kind of skill that is going to be very valuable in tomorrow's world.

- Well, I would like to at this moment, to just put in and sort of a plug for my alma mater, Hampshire College, which has been doing this for 55 years, refuse to let artists be unmindful of science and math, mathematics and vice versa.

And they've been turning out people who I think, like Steve Jobs, who, who I knew pretty well had that ability to sort of understand the technological and the human dynamics and the way that the ultimate success has to do with your willingness to accept that.

So let me just ask you a final question that imagine Leonardo could time travel to the present day, you know, what modern technologies do you think would blow his mind?

What, what, what would he, what would he look at and go, wow, you did it?

I mean, he certainly wouldn't be surprised at the helicopter and the flying machine and the plane and the artificial hearts and, and all sorts of stuff, but I think he'd be amazed at a lot of stuff we've done.

- I mean, I think he'd be amazed at almost every, he'd be like, you know, penicillin, you know, where do we start?

I mean, so much has happened since his time, but, you know, I think the internet would blow his mind.

Just the, the absolute, you know, number of sort of people who can express themselves and share things freely across the internet.

You know, I think he'd be very interested in things like CRISPR and genetic engineering because he was so interested in, in human anatomy and, and the body as kind of its own sort of mechanical object.

I, I really have struggled to think about how Leonardo da Vinci would feel about the generative AI movement, because on one hand, like, I'm sure he would've, he would be amazed by some of the stuff that AI is able to create.

On the other hand, you know, if you gave him, you know, an account on one of these things where you just type in something and it spits out a piece of art, I don't, I don't know that he would like that so much.

He was a, he was a crafts person.

He was, you know, he believed he was a humanist, as we said.

Like, I don't know that he would feel great about these machines that just kind of gobble up all of the collective output of creative humans and sort of extrude something that represents like a statistical average.

Maybe he would've been delighted and amazed by that, but I think he would've also found that something was sort of missing or, or dehumanizing about it.

I - Think, I, I agree with you.

The generative nature of it would be he wants to ha get his hands dirty.

He wants to see himself.

He doesn't need to have somebody, a robot, do that for him.

But I think he'd also love the internet as the greatest library on earth and give people like him the chance to expand that knowledge exponentially.

Kevin, Kevin, thank you so much for joining us today for this Unum chat on Leonardo da Vinci and technology and all of your fine work.

We're so grateful for your time, and you've added to our understanding immensely.

Thank you so - Much.

Thanks for having me.

Thanks, Ken.