22 records

People

Authors and historical actors, reconciled to Wikidata.

• Ada PalmerUnverifieddraftHistorian of the Renaissance and of the history of ideas, and a novelist.
• Andy WarholUnverifieddraftAmerican artist, whose Marilyn Diptych the essay uses for identity dissolving into its reproductions.
• Blaise PascalUnverifieddraftFrench mathematician and religious philosopher, author of the wager the essay's observing agent was named after.
• Eden MedinaUnverifieddraftHistorian of technology whose work on Project Cybersyn is the standard scholarly account of Chile's cybernetic experiment.
• Jacob BurckhardtUnverifieddraftSwiss cultural historian whose study of the Italian Renaissance introduced the idea of the state as a work of art.
• James C. ScottUnverifieddraftPolitical scientist and anthropologist of agrarian societies, whose work on legibility and mētis is the central antagonist of any argument for machine-readable government.
• Jean Le TavernierUnverifieddraftFlemish manuscript illuminator working for the Burgundian court, noted for grisaille, and the artist of the portrait of Jean Miélot in his scriptorium.
• Jean MiélotUnverifieddraftAuthor, translator, scribe and priest, secretary to Philip the Good of Burgundy, and the subject of one of the best-known portraits of a medieval scribe at work.
• Jeremy BenthamUnverifieddraftEnglish philosopher, founder of utilitarianism, and the coiner of codification, who attacked English law as unknowable rather than merely unjust.
• Johannes GutenbergUnverifieddraftGerman goldsmith and printer, whose movable-type press removed the bottleneck on dissemination that the essay takes as its historical analogue.
• Liam WilkinsonUnverifieddraftEngineer working on AI in and around government, and the author of the essays this collection supports.
• Martin LutherUnverifieddraftGerman theologian whose Ninety-five Theses spread across Europe within weeks of the press making it possible.
• Neel NandaUnverifieddraftResearcher leading mechanistic interpretability at Google DeepMind, and one of the field's founding figures.
• Niccolò MachiavelliUnverifieddraftFlorentine official and political theorist, whose Discourses argue that republics survive by returning to their founding principles.
• René MagritteUnverifieddraftBelgian surrealist painter, whose Not to be Reproduced and Golconda open and close the essay.
• Robert WalpoleUnverifieddraftFirst Lord of the Treasury from 1721 to 1742, and by convention the first British prime minister, an office he denied holding.
• Stafford BeerUnverifieddraftBritish management cybernetician, author of the Viable System Model, and chief designer of Project Cybersyn.
• Stanley KubrickUnverifieddraftAmerican film director, whose Dr. Strangelove supplies the CivBench essay with its recurring imagery.
• TacitusUnverifieddraftRoman senator and historian, whose Annals supply the observation that laws multiply as a state becomes corrupt.
• Virginia EubanksUnverifieddraftPolitical scientist who writes on how automated eligibility, scoring and prediction systems fall on poor and working-class people in the United States.
• Ward CunninghamUnverifieddraftAmerican programmer, inventor of the wiki, and the origin of the debt metaphor in software engineering.
• William CoxeUnverifieddraftEnglish historian and clergyman, biographer of Sir Robert Walpole.