In the early 1980s, a virtually unknown Chicago-born intellectual named Patrick Gunkel became convinced that advances in computer technology would soon create the conditions for a worldwide renaissance.
Gunkel believed the core of this renaissance would be a new science of idea generation enabled by artificial intelligence that would unravel the secrets of nature and human consciousness. He called this new science ideonomy (prounouced "IDEA-onomy").
A self-taught genius who never graduated eleventh grade, by the time he was 34, Gunkel had surveyed all human knowledge and glimpsed within the jumbled, haphazard outlines of the arts and sciences a massive logical structure hidden in plain sight.
In a 1981 memo1 to Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) computer scientist and long-time friend Edward Fredkin, Gunkel wrote:
I believe the emergence of something equivalent to ideonomy is inevitable in the course of the next few decades... ideonomy will lead, I believe, to ‘the industrialization of thought,’ or an ‘idea industry’ having considerable analogy to the new recombinant DNA industry, which seeks to generate new organisms by mastering and exploiting systematic laws of permutation, combination, and transformation of life’s fundamental elements and processes.
With grant funding from the Richard Lounsbery Foundation in New York City, for nine years Gunkel churned out thousands of charts, diagrams, lists, computer programs, and manuscript pages to explain ideonomy to the world. He pitched his science to hundreds of experts across the United States.
He lectured at least three times at MIT.
A front-page feature story of Gunkel appeared in the June 1, 1987, Wall Street Journal.2
And yet even after all of this, Gunkel’s science of ideas remained opaque and esoteric to all but his closest friends and advocates.
It wasn't entirely his fault.
In a pattern that has repeated over and over again throughout history, a visionary who was ahead of his time tried to communicate a remarkable new view of the world and was ignored.
Although Gunkel died in 2017 before he could see his vision advanced by others, recent improvements in artificial intelligence have created a context that makes ideonomy easier to understand.
And with every passing year, the importance of Gunkel's epochal vision is confirmed more strongly than ever before.
This newsletter is committed to Gunkel and the unfolding of his epic vision.
Every few weeks, we will share and contextualize a fragment of original archival material, commentary, or research to help illuminate Gunkel and his awe-inspiring vision of a science that may one day prove every bit as useful as mathematics.
The Gunkel Global Research Project (GGRP) is an IRS-authorized 501(c)(3) public charity dedicated to furthering Gunkel’s legacy and work.
Its CEO, Andrew McIntosh, is Gunkel’s biographer.
Whether you’ve been interested in Gunkel for a long time or just showing up now, we’re only getting started.
In future weeks you will be amazed at everything you didn’t know about Patrick, his life, his ideas, and his legacy.
As you wait with great excitement for the next newsletter to drop, check out a few web resources below to acquaint yourself with Gunkel and his “science of ideas” —
Category I - The following things have to do with Patrick Gunkel:
Ideonomy Website - the MIT web site curated by faculty advisor Whitman Richards, which we will explore in depth over the coming months and years. Spoiler alert: it’s an absolute mess. Not only did Gunkel have problems finishing anything, including his massive magnum opus, but the site itself is a frantic mishmash of materials thrown together by an undergraduate student who was forced to balance the deluge of Gunkel’s prolific mind against his ambition to graduate on time. Work on the website stopped in the early 2000s, cementing its true beauty as an Internet time capsule with a stamp of legitimacy conferred by the MIT domain name.
The Gunkel Global Renaissance Project - the public charity created to publish this newsletter and do a bunch of other things to further Gunkel’s legacy and ideas. Here you can find an easy-to-understand summary of ideonomy along with various resources and academic papers that suggest its totally untapped potential.
Category II - The following things have nothing to do with Patrick Gunkel:
Ideonomy.com - A Spanish-language blogger who does not yet realize he will one day be able to sell his web domain for a pile of cash.
David J. Gunkel - In a very strange coincidence that would have made Patrick’s head spin, there’s an AI and robotics researcher with the last name Gunkel who is also from Chicago. NO RELATION.
References:
(1) “In a 1981 memo…” - author’s original archival research.
(2) “A front-page feature story of Gunkel….“ see: https://ideonomy.mit.edu/gunkel.html