Fifty Years of Making the World More Editable

Apple and Genentech were both founded in 1976, fifty years ago.

One helped transform the seemingly specialized technology of computing into something ordinary people could use. The other helped establish an industry built on a remarkable proposition: that genetic information could be manipulated, allowing us to engineer living organisms to produce things nature had never produced in quite that way.

Both companies helped change our understanding of what was normal—and what was possible.

And both emerged from a distinctive culture in California's Bay Area, a place unusually receptive to the idea that the world is more editable, more malleable, than previous generations imagined.

The deeper connection between computing and genetics is information.

Software code determines what computers do. Genetic information helps determine what living organisms become and how they function. In both cases, changing information can change the behavior of extraordinarily complex systems.

And that suggests something profound: the possibilities available to us depend not merely on the resources we possess, but on how those resources are organized.

Information is central to that organization. Change the information, and we can change what is possible.

Fifty years after Apple and Genentech were founded, AI is extending that insight into another domain: our ability to organize knowledge, work, and institutions.

Perhaps the most consequential discovery of the Information Economy was not simply that we could process information.

It was that more of the world than we had imagined could be rewritten.