"Where are today's Michelangelos? Goyas? Shakespeares? Cervantes? Goethes? Montaignes? Pushkins? Dostoevskys? Balzacs? Mozarts? Where are our Einsteins, our Darwins, our Maxwells, our Newtons, our Aristotles, our Socrates?"
In the past, there were geniuses, but why not today?
The article considers some interesting hypotheses, like the switch from tutoring to bureaucratized mass education systems.
But, spoiler, I'll just jump to the conclusion: Geniuses are in new fields, not established fields. The discovery of element 117 took a large team of people across multiple continents, all to prove the element had existed in a particle accelerator for a few milliseconds. In the 1670s, when chemistry was a new field, element 15 (phosphorus) could be discovered by 1 person.
That's why today, the geniuses aren't chemistry geniuses. They're in new fields like AI and cryptocurrency. They're people like Vitalik Buterin, inventor of Ethereum, the first cryptocurrency to support smart contracts, and Geoffrey Hinton, co-inventor (with David Rumelhart and Ronald J. Williams) of the now-ubiquitous backpropagation algorithm that is essential to training any neural network that goes beyond a single layer.
