I have tried and failed many times to write a certain essay. With inspiration from Scott Alexander and Borges, I have reframed it as a story. That reframing has been productive, and leads to the following plot.
The setting is a medieval kingdom. Through circumstances not relevant to this plot, the kingdom’s leading scholar has become an oracle, who now knows everything that there is to know. The king orders that he be placed under house arrest, to avoid his being targeted by a rival kingdom, or his escape, or even his slipping and falling on his head. Only carefully vetted individuals can visit him for advice. The oracle receives this arrangement with benevolent indifference.
The king’s advisors ask the oracle for stately advice, on taxation and war, on relations with other kingdoms. But it is an ambitious merchant who one day chooses to pursue a different line of opportunity. He tells the oracle that he wants to create a tonic that will cure a common and deadly disease, so that he can sell it to doctors and patients across the kingdom. The oracle gives him instructions for what ingredients to collect and how to process them. His advice helps the merchant create a health treatment that works miraculously often. As the merchant produces and sells this medicine, he accumulates even more riches, and the oracle becomes even more renowned.
Doctors throughout the kingdom come to learn from the oracle, to see how he was able to cure this disease. Most of them leave frustrated, telling others that the oracle can only speak of mysterious concepts such as “germs”. When pressed further, he can only link these concepts to other cryptic ideas like “proteins”, which are somehow linked to cattle, even though the disease is not caused by animals in any way. While most of these prospective students leave in pessimism that they can learn anything useful from the oracle, a few stay to study with him. The oracle does not object to this arrangement. Some of these students become adept healers on their own, while others abandon medicine and begin conducting studies with symbols that they cannot explain to their former colleagues.
The merchant is farsighted. He realizes that with the oracle’s instruction and his own resources, he can build things that the king could never imagine. He imagines palaces in the sky, using the stars as fuel. He imagines a farm that uses machines to produce food without human or animal power. He imagines horses that can travel fast enough to cross the kingdom in a day. He takes these visions to the oracle and asks for help in realizing them. The oracle accepts. The merchant hires thousands of artificers to carry out the oracle’s instructions, and they get to work on building the city of the future.
At this point, I can see two endings to this story. Initially, I conceived the oracle’s task as impossible. So I first imagined an ending where his help is insufficient. Components built in spring degrade by autumn, so that the artificers constantly have to return to the oracle for new consultations. Artificers come and go over the years, and each new person inherits a half-finished machine of such complexity that it takes years before they can understand everything they need to know in order to carry out the instructions. The project stagnates in perpetual memorylessness.
After decades of this delay, the oracle passes away from old age. His passing destroys the merchant’s vision for the city of the future. Resolved to find a successor, the merchant travels across the kingdom to appeal to all of the oracle’s students, and offers them a lifetime of riches if they can finish their teacher’s work. A few of them show promise in how much of the oracle’s teachings they have grasped, but they readily admit that it will be decades before they are capable of continuing the project. The merchant does not have decades to offer them; he himself passes away within a few years of the oracle.
With no one to lead the work or provide the instructions, the city of the future is abandoned. The half-constructed machines and structures become objects of curiosity for scholars, who use them to learn more about the physical world. These learnings do advance society, but their contribution is meager compared to what the merchant had imagined.
To me, this ending reflects the story that flows most naturally from this premise. But when I challenged myself to conceive of success for the merchant’s project, I imagined an interesting scenario.
In this second ending, the oracle successfully sees the project through. The artificers’ hands and the merchant’s management move in accordance with his blueprints, and they do build a city that is more advanced than any cities of the past, and (though they do not know it yet) will be more advanced than any cities of the future, for another thousand years.
But nobody who lives in the city of the future understands it. They live as children, cradled by intelligent design. Their rooms are warmed and cooled by invisible force, their food is created and prepared by anonymous mechanisms, and their lights glow without fire. Visitors from around the world come to see this impossible city, only to be baffled that nobody in this city can tell them how it works.
When the oracle eventually passes away, there is nobody who understands the city they live in. The oracle leaves behind detailed manuals on the complex maintenance required to keep the city functioning smoothly. An entire guild of artificers is trained using these manuals. They debate over its ambiguous terminology, over segments that appear to contradict each other, over situations that are not covered explicitly in the manuals. Over time, the manuals become scripture, the artificers become priests, the guild becomes a church, and the oracle becomes the city’s founding deity.
Each new generation inherits unreplicable prosperity, and the city carries on in perfect constancy for many lifetimes.
Cross-posted from my substack.
This is a nice story, but it doesn't feel realistic to treat the city of the future as such an all-or-nothing affair. Wouldn't there be many individual components (like the merchant's initial medical tonic) that could be stand-alone technologies, diffusing throughout the world and smoothly raising standards of living in the usual way? In this sense, even your "optimistic" story seems too pessimistic about the wide-ranging, large-scale impact of the scholar's advice.
The world of the story would still develop quite differently than in real history, since they're:
This and other effects (like the obvious power-concentration aspect of whoever controls access to the oracle's insights) would probably produce a very lopsided-seeming world compared to actual modernity. But I don't think it would end up looking like either of the two endings to your story.
(Of course, your more poetic endings fit the form of a traditional fable much better. "And then the city kicked off an accelerating techno-industrial singularity" doesn't really fit the classic repertoire of tragedy, comedy, etc!)