Harnessing Revolutionary Technologies (Pt.1)
The Beautiful Life | Issue #115
Hi Champ,
What you are about to read has been on my mind for quite a while. It is the kind of conversation that deserves to be unpacked carefully, layer by layer, because what is at stake is significant.
The matter of concern is harnessing revolutionary technologies, and it touches on several areas: Animal Skins. Roman Roads. The Gutenberg’s Press. The World Wide Web. And Artificial Intelligence, or Artificial General Intelligence.
Yes, animal skins. We will get there.
But Why Does This Matter to Us Right Now?
It matters because our generation is genuinely privileged in a way that most people have not paused to appreciate. We are those closest to some of the most revolutionary paradigm shifts in all of human history. The rate at which these shifts occurred in centuries past was quite slow. Generations would live and die without witnessing anything truly earth-shattering in terms of how life worked. But we? We are so adjacent to some of the most mind-blowing technological advancements humanity has ever seen. We are not just reading about them in history books. We have lived through some of them. We are in the middle of one of the most pivotal right now.
Where Humans Actually Started
Worldviews influence our ideas about human anthropology: where we came from and how we developed to this point. Many people will tell you that early man was as unrefined, as primitive, as one could imagine, drawing on stories of the Stone Age and evolutionary anthropology, where fire was something discovered only after long eons and framed in mythology as a thing stolen from the gods.
But my anthropology for the human experience is sourced from the Bible. And according to Scripture, it was not so long into human history before we saw fire. Abel offered sacrifices, and those sacrifices involved fire. We also read of Cain’s descendants building musical instruments and working with metal. This means your worldview regarding human origins will directly influence how you think about human development over the millennia. The first men actually carried an advanced understanding of the world.
Consider Noah’s ark: built from gopher wood and covered with tar. According to history, it was not until roughly 300 to 400 years ago that humanity could begin to build seafaring vessels of comparable size. What we begin to see, then, is that there was an unusual advancement early in human history that later tapered off as people descended into barbarism. And yet, all through that history, there are flashes of people doing extraordinary things with technology and tools.
The Benin Kingdom, for instance, had sophisticated street layouts centuries ago. Street lamps, not electrical ones, but street lamps nonetheless. At certain points in history, the Benin Kingdom was more advanced than cities like London in terms of urban planning and the intricacy of its works of art.
The point of all this is to help us track what the truly revolutionary things actually are. The discovery of fire in its various expressions was revolutionary. The ability to smelt metal, bend it to different shapes, and forge instruments: these were world-changing. You cannot build an ark without tools. And so we see that the impulse to create and to solve problems is as old as humanity itself.
What typically happened throughout history was that the scale and spread of breakthrough technologies were not universal. A discovery in one corner of the world might take centuries to reach another.
That is why our generation is uniquely privileged. The internal combustion engine is less than 200 years old, perhaps less. The wheel, just the wheel, was revolutionary in itself because it suddenly allowed for transportation and movement at a faster rate. It amplified what horses could do; where one or two people could ride on a horse, now six or eight could be drawn by horses in a carriage. Oxen and mules were suddenly able to plow larger swaths of farmland. All because of the introduction of wheels.
But after the wheel was discovered, it took years, centuries perhaps, before the next major paradigm shift arrived. What I find remarkable is that we, who are alive right now, have witnessed multiple paradigm shifts within a single lifetime.
For those of us reading today, there was never a time we did not know that electricity existed, that there were cars, motorcycles, trains, and aeroplanes. We may not have ridden every one of them, but we have always known they exist. We have always known that a plane can carry a person from Nigeria to Australia.
But if you were to drop a car into the streets of Jerusalem 2,000 years ago, it would cause something close to an alien invasion. People would have no grid for what they were seeing. Not to speak of a plane, or a mobile phone. The idea of seeing someone’s face and speaking to them in real time across vast distances would have been incomprehensible.
The things our generation has taken for granted would have been tremendous paradigm shifts for people who lived before us. We inherited most of these things and simply accepted them as the status quo.
There was a time when the automobile itself terrified people. Some said it would never be a successful product. The common remark, often attributed to conversations around Henry Ford, is that if he had asked people what improvement they wanted in transportation, they would have said: faster horses. Instead, Ford combined the internal combustion engine with the assembly line, and cars began rolling out like clockwork. That combination was the paradigm shift.
And now we have another one: electric vehicles. Cars that emit no smoke, that are silent as the night, so silent that intentional sound has to be engineered into their movement so pedestrians can hear them coming. This is another revolution, unfolding before our eyes.
The World Wide Web Changed the Shape of Everything
Once upon a time, communication happened through handwritten letters, typewritten letters, fax machines, radio frequencies. Then Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, and someone in the United Kingdom could suddenly access something written in Lagos and read it in real time.
Before that, there were stationary servers. To download content required a telephone line doubling as an internet line, and files could take days to transfer. Then came the cloud. Suddenly, access was no longer tethered to a machine. The size of your RAM became less critical if you had a subscription to Google Drive, Dropbox, or any other Software-as-a-Service product. You could access your files from anywhere, on any device.
All of this is so close to us, so familiar, that we have stopped marveling at it. Many younger readers may not even remember floppy diskettes, those compact disks you had to physically insert into a machine. Or USB sticks, which were once so coveted that people wore them on lanyards around their necks as a flex of tech-savviness. These things are nearly obsolete now.
There was a time when having a laptop with a CD-ROM drive was a status symbol. You could play movies on the go. And then came USB sticks, and then streaming, and now most of us carry entire libraries in our pockets with a single medium – our phones.
While many technologies have introduced new experiences, not all have been equally revolutionary. That is why it is worth identifying the handful of breakthrough technologies that have actually reshaped the world, because they form the pattern that leads us to the present technology every person needs to reckon with.
Consider the transition from cassettes to CDs to MP3s. That shift was genuinely paradigm-shifting. When Steve Jobs introduced the iPod, he said: 1,000 songs in your pocket. Where before you might have needed fifty cassettes or a hundred CDs to hold a thousand songs, now everything fit into a single device that sat in the palm of your hand. That was staggering for people who had lived with the alternative.
There is a story I often return to. In Ibadan, near the court at Iagoku, there used to be a community of remarkably skilled typists. Women who would not even look at what they were typing. Their fingers flew across the keys, clacking away, while they held conversations with each other. It had become muscle memory. They were brilliant at their craft. They felt set for life.
But they never reckoned with the existence of a man called Bill Gates, who had the ambition to put a computer on every desk and in every home in the world. They never considered that in the Bay Area, in Palo Alto, San Francisco, and that whole region, a group of people were dreaming up ambitious plans that would make their trade obsolete.
Here is the thing I need you to understand: the people who are building technologies and shaping them are not taking permission from you. They are not taking permission from anyone. They are investing enormous resources to introduce a new way of living, and they are ensuring they are at the vanguard of it, locking everyone else into the inevitability of the future they are building.
Nobody came to take permission from copy editors. Nobody consulted proofreaders before building automated writing tools. Nobody asked the women at Iyaganku before desktop computing made their typewriters redundant.
And this is what we must not allow to happen to us when it comes to AI and AGI.
The more I sit with Artificial Intelligence and the ultimate horizon of Artificial General Intelligence, the more I have come to see that this is entirely Babel again.
Babel was a people coming together with one purpose: Let us build a city and a tower that reaches up to heaven. Let us make a name for ourselves. Let us not be scattered. God’s response? There is nothing these people have imagined doing that can be stopped, because they have one mind.
Connectivity was Babel’s proposition. And interestingly, connectivity is one of the central promises of the Internet. Globalization, fast-tracked by the World Wide Web, has allowed trade across borders, cultural diffusion, and exchange at a pace never seen before. Nigerian Gen Z’s and American Gen Z’s dress the same. They reference the same trends. A fashion statement in West Africa is being appreciated in Australia within the same week.
What would once have taken years to spread culturally now spreads in seconds. A trend breaks out in Philadelphia, and before the day is done, it is on TikTok and everyone is jumping on it.
When you look at the Internet, the World Wide Web, or Artificial Intelligence, something becomes clear: there are always two interests underlying every technology. There is the interest of those pursuing these technologies as a means of rebellion against God, as the continuation of Babel’s project of building without Him. And there are those pursuing these technologies as a means of restoration toward God’s original design.
The tension will always remain. It will always exist within all technologies.
Is God against connectivity? No. If you look at the feasts of ancient Israel, there was always a deep sense of community, of gathering, of convergence. The problem with Babel was not the desire to connect; it was the declaration of independence from God in the process. That distinction matters enormously as we navigate what is coming.
Of Animal Skins
Now let us return to where the subtitle began: animal skins. This is the first technology.
When man fell, he found himself naked and ashamed. And his immediate response was to fashion a covering of fig leaves. That was the first post-fall act of human creation. And it worked, in the short term.
But what God did was something altogether different. God took animal skins and clothed them.
If you have ever owned an original leather belt, you know what this means. A genuine leather belt can last fifteen, twenty years and still hold its form. The craftsmanship endures. In contrast, fig leaves dry up. They crack and crumble. Whatever man conceives in a fallen state might look like a solution in the immediate moment, but as time stretches, the seeming solution becomes a problem in itself, demanding constant replacement and maintenance.
God’s intervention was different in kind, not just in degree. It pointed toward something durable, something sustainable, something closer to permanence.
This contrast, man’s invention and God’s intervention, is not just a theological curiosity. It is a mental model for everything we encounter. For every technology man creates, there is an advance on it that God is willing to supply. For every fig leaf solution, there is an animal skin alternative: something that serves the same function but is built to last.
The moment you see this contrast clearly, you can begin to probe every technology with a new set of questions. Not just does this work? but how long will it work, and toward what end?
Technology Number Two: Roman Roads
There were many revolutionary developments between animal skins and Roman roads, but the roads deserve their place in this conversation.
Roman roads were the first infrastructure to allow culture to spread without warfare as the vehicle. Rome built roads that extended across the known world, and some of them are intact to this day. There are reports of Roman roads discovered submerged beneath river bodies, still intact, even after centuries of being covered by water and sediment.
The roads were paradigm-shifting because they enabled movement, trade, and cultural export at a scale previously impossible. Roman numerals became standard across the world not because they were imposed at swordpoint everywhere, but because the roads created the channels through which Roman culture traveled.
Every civilization that arose after Rome recognized the lesson: control the pathways and you control the spread of culture. The British took dominion over the seas. At the height of the British Empire, it was said that the sun never set on its territories, from Canada to India to Nigeria, stretching across perhaps a hundred countries. America today rules the air, both in military hardware (fighter jets, stealth bombers, etc.) and in software, as well as through Hollywood and the cultural dominance of its entertainment industry.
In every era, the civilization that controls the distribution network controls the world.
And here is the insight: the World Wide Web is simply a turbocharged digital expression of what the Roman roads were in their day. Distribution. Reach. The democratization of movement, now applied to information and culture.
Technology Number Three: Gutenberg’s Printing Press
Before the printing press, knowledge was locked in libraries. And libraries were not the easily accessible places we might imagine. Books were handwritten manuscripts, stored in institutions that people had to travel distances to visit. To encounter a hundred books in one place would have felt like seeing all the books in the world.
Gutenberg built the printing press, and it changed everything. The typeface allowed pages to be set and reproduced, making multiple identical copies portable and readily available. The first book printed on Gutenberg’s press was the Bible.
What followed was a breakout of knowledge. Information was no longer the exclusive preserve of an elite few. The Reformation happened because the printing press existed. Ordinary people could read Scripture for themselves. Ideas that had been controlled by gatekeepers were suddenly in circulation.
And notice the pattern. The Roman roads had already been built before Jesus came. When Paul traveled across the known world to spread the gospel, he was moving on infrastructure that Rome had constructed for its own purposes. Man built something. God took possession of it and advanced His own purposes through it. The technology was repurposed for something far greater than its original architects had intended.
The Gutenberg press was similar: invented, and immediately used for the most consequential book in human history.
The World Wide Web repeats this pattern at digital scale. Distribution and democratization, combined in one infrastructure. Books that scholars of the nineteenth century would have waited years to access, because libraries had limited copies and lending periods, are now freely available with a search query. Most of these old books have seen their copyrights expired and their contents digitized and open for all to access.
What some people would have had to fight for, we scroll past without noticing.
When revolutionary technologies arrive, they completely reshape how the world functions. Some people resist. We saw pockets of resistance to mobile telephones: people who swore they would have nothing to do with it. Today, those people have largely been excluded from the bulk of how modern life runs.
Consider navigation. Not long ago, whenever one traveled to an unfamiliar place, the process involved stopping at junctions to ask strangers for directions. They would give complex, multi-step instructions that were half-forgotten by the next turn. Now Google Maps is open before the engine starts, and it is genuinely difficult to remember what it felt like to navigate any other way. That transition happened within one generation, and it already feels like ancient history.
This is the nature of revolutionary technologies. They create a new normal that does not announce itself until it is already the only world anyone can imagine.
Does all of this mean we should embrace every technology without reservation? Absolutely not.
This is precisely why AI and AGI require careful, deliberate engagement. The Babel dimension is real. There are those building these technologies who are, whether consciously or not, constructing a world in which humanity declares independence from God on an entirely new scale. The ambition of AGI, a machine that can reason and create across any domain as well as or better than any human, is not a neutral engineering project. It carries within it a set of assumptions about what humanity is, what intelligence is, and what the future should look like.
And yet, as we have seen, God has a pattern of taking what man builds for one purpose and layering it with new possibilities for those who are partnering with him.
The question is not simply whether to engage with AI. The question is: on what terms, with what philosophy, and toward what end?
There was once a computer as large as a standing refrigerator, capable of only one task: playing chess. It could beat the world’s top grandmaster, but that was all it could do. One task, one domain, nothing else. The technologies we have today are categorically different. They can learn to play any game within days, and within a week they surpass the best human players. They are not narrow tools. They are general learners.
The trajectory is steep, and it is not slowing.
If man created fig leaves at the beginning, and God gave animal skins in response, what is the equivalent of animal skins in our generation?
That is the question. What does a durable, sustainable, God-shaped engagement with AI and AGI actually look like? Something with the quality of animal skins: designed to last, to protect, to serve its purpose without constant replacement.
All of this raises something important, and it is worth addressing before we close. The question of how we engage with these technologies without losing ourselves to them. How we retain our agency, particularly those of us who are writers and creatives, in a world that is moving faster than our ability to form a considered response to it.
Language matters enormously in framing everything we do. The moment you frame technologies as tools, you relocate the power. A tool does not wield its user; the user wields the tool. Every technology must be approached this way.
But it is easy to say this and hard to sustain it, because the nudges are imperceptible. The erosion of agency does not arrive as a dramatic choice. It comes in small increments, through design patterns, recommendation algorithms, and the accumulated weight of habit. Saying “technology is a tool” is not by itself enough to build structures of resistance against that erosion.
What you need are mental models. And that is precisely why this letter started with animal skins. For those who hold the fig leaves and animal skins contrast clearly in mind, a question is already available whenever a new technology presents itself: Is this a fig leaf, or is this an animal skin? Does this work in the immediate but wear out under pressure, or does it carry the quality of durability? That single question, held consistently, becomes a powerful orienting force.
My own practice is what I would call default resistance, not resistance to using something, but resistance at the level of mindset. I may begin using a tool while I am still forming my philosophy for it. I use it lightly, observing, staying curious. But once I have a formed philosophy or theology for its use, once the frameworks and mental models are clear, I engage with much greater freedom and boldness. The boundaries are defined, and within them I can move without anxiety.
For some areas, that theology will be shared across all of us: certain collective resistances we must all develop together. For others, it will be personal, shaped by calling, vocation, and context.
Consider the Luddites, those nineteenth-century craftsmen who resisted industrial textile machinery. They may have failed to compete with industrial-scale production. But they could still be the artisans with workshops selling one-of-a-kind masterpieces, produced slowly, with care, at a price that reflects the time invested. There is a market for that. There will always be a market for that. The question is not whether to compete on the machine’s terms, but whether to define your own terms entirely.
There is a book by Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, that explores this tension between fast and slow cognition. It is worth sitting with, because the tension it describes is one we are all living inside. The fast-paced world is not going anywhere. But it is possible to redeem pockets of time by intentionally slowing down, by practicing what I would call solitude as a defense.
To practice solitude is to untether yourself from the metrics, again and again. To break the programming. To go be reset, defragmented, returned to wholeness, so that you see things in full rather than through the compressed lens of the never-ending now.
The mindset is the first and most comprehensive line of defense. The philosophy that undergirds how we engage with these technologies is the foundation everything else rests on.
And that is what we will continue to build as we answer the central question: what could animal skins look like in the age of AI and AGI?
Between now and then, let the contrast sit with you. Fig leaves or animal skins? Man’s invention or God’s intervention? Short-term cover or durable design?
Think on these things.
Until next time,
JD.
Curated Gems
Every issue of this newsletter comes with a curated list of essays, videos, and/or audio that will help you dive deeper into The Beautiful Life. Enjoy these picks for today's issue!
“What We Build Reveals Who We Are” — James Lucas, Beauty is Truth
The Romans built a dome in 126 AD whose concrete repairs itself when it cracks. They built an aqueduct without a single drop of mortar that carried water until 1973. They built an amphitheater still hosting live opera every summer. Lucas walks through six of these structures and asks what it means to build something intended to outlast you. The question underneath it all is what separates things built for permanence from things built to be replaced. Beautiful, unhurried writing.
Read it here.
“The Datacenter Bible” — TSCS
Every conversation about AI eventually runs into the question of what it is physically built on. This piece answers that in full. A single Nvidia Blackwell rack draws 120 kilowatts of power. If cooling fails, thermal runaway begins in seconds. The five largest tech companies committed to spending $650 billion this year on the buildings that house these machines, and the wait time for a single power transformer is now nearly three years. A long read, but the most grounded, unglamorous account of what the AI revolution actually looks like in concrete and steel.
Read it here.
“How I Broke My Phone Addiction (After Years of Failing)” — Colby Kultgen
The key insight here is that phone addiction is not a technology problem but an emotional regulation problem. People do not reach for their phones because they want to scroll. They reach for them to avoid something: boredom, loneliness, discomfort. That reframe changes everything about how you approach the solution. Honest, practical, and worth the read.
Read it here.
“Story of Cities: Benin, the mighty medieval capital — The Guardian (2016)
The letter briefly mentions the Benin Kingdom’s sophistication. Most people have never looked it up. This piece examines its walls (four times longer than the Great Wall of China), its palm-oil street lamps predating London’s by decades, and the testimony of a Portuguese captain in 1691 who called it larger than Lisbon, with streets “as far as the eye can see.” It is the kind of history that quietly dismantles assumptions about where civilisation lived and what it looked like.
Read it here.
P.S.: If you got value from this issue of The Beautiful Life, I'm sure you can think of a friend or two who would love to subscribe. Share this email with them and ask them to subscribe via this link before the next issue rolls out next week.
Thanks for reading Beautiful Life Letters! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and connect with me across my social media platforms here.
Thank you so much for the resource sir.
Holding extremes in perfect balance 👌