Hi — I’m Anna-Sofia, I write about the philosophy of technology and the beauty of science. I think every major scientific breakthrough also carries a philosophical one, yet this connection is often overlooked.
The feedback loop between the tools we create, and how those tools, in turn, change us has become a vortex, blurring the line between the natural and the artificial, at once opening new doors and presenting new questions worth investigating. This is not a novel observation, and has been expressed by many thinkers over the centuries. I like José Ortega y Gasset’s characterization that, “today man no longer lives in nature, but is instead housed in the supernature he has created.” The title of the blog is influenced by this idea.
I work at Humba Ventures, where I am constantly on the search for brilliant teams reimagining what’s possible in manufacturing, industrials, energy, defense, and more. There, I write a series called How It’s Built, which profiles companies building frontier technologies.
Previously, I started an online publication called Foundations & Frontiers to investigate these ideas a little more clearly. The goal was to expose the technologies we depend on in the modern day, describe the principles behind their operation, and the novel research directions being pursued to extend their capabilities. While, I have stopped actively writing that series, you can still read all of my pieces on metallurgy, microprocessors, food production, fusion, batteries, satellites, artificial intelligence, carbon capture, cell therapies, robots, lidar, solar power, spatial computing, molecular manufacturing, the grid, tunneling, fission, desalination, advanced manufacturing, concrete, rocketry, plastics, aviation, video games, mars technologies, the internet, brain-computer interfaces, fossil fuels, synthetic biology, electric vehicles, mining, computational biology, geothermal energy, encryption, bridges, wind energy, inference costs, semaglutides, microplastics, supercomputers, soil erosion.
You should subscribe if you want to follow along with regular posts on the history of technology, economics, philosophy, literature, and other such things.
