People
Authors and historical actors, reconciled to Wikidata.
71 records. Review labels describe the catalogue entry, not the source’s reliability. About record status
Ada Palmer
Historian of the Renaissance and of the history of ideas, and a novelist.
Qualified confidenceImage credit
Ada Palmer at the Hugo Awards in Helsinki, 2017. Cropped version supplied by Wikimedia Commons.Sanna Pudas · CC BY 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons
Alexander De Ville
Former No. 10 Innovation Fellow, product and operations leader, and lead author of the Incubator practitioner playbook. A fellow fellow and a good friend.
Qualified confidenceAllen Raymond
New York Herald Tribune journalist whose December 1932 reporting exposed Howard Scott's invented credentials.
Limited evidenceAndy Burnham
British Labour politician, Mayor of Greater Manchester from 2017 and Prime Minister at the time of the essay.
Qualified confidence
Andy Warhol
American artist, whose Marilyn Diptych the essay uses for identity dissolving into its reproductions.
Qualified confidenceImage credit
Bernard Gotfryd · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
Anne Lacaton
French architect, co-founder of Lacaton & Vassal and joint 2021 Pritzker laureate.
High confidenceBalaji Srinivasan
Entrepreneur and investor, former chief technology officer of Coinbase, author of The Network State.
Limited evidence
Blaise Pascal
French mathematician and religious philosopher, author of the wager the essay's observing agent was named after.
High confidenceImage credit
unknown; a copy of the painting of François II Quesnel, which was made for Gérard Edelinck en 1691 [réf. nécessaire] . · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
Charles Proteus Steinmetz
Electrical engineer at General Electric and member of the Technical Alliance.
Limited evidenceChristophe Hutin
Bordeaux architect, co-architect of the Grand Parc transformation.
Qualified confidenceDominic Cummings
British political adviser and writer whose 2020 recruitment essay calls for broader technical expertise in government.
High confidenceEden Medina
Historian of technology and author of Cybernetic Revolutionaries, a scholarly account of Chile’s Project Cybersyn.
High confidenceElon Musk
Businessman who leads SpaceX and Tesla; led the US Department of Government Efficiency in 2025.
Limited evidenceFernando Flores
Chilean engineer at CORFO who invited Stafford Beer to Chile and led Project Cybersyn on the government side.
Limited evidenceFrédéric Druot
French architect who worked with Lacaton & Vassal on the PLUS study and on the Bois-le-Prêtre, Saint-Nazaire and Grand Parc transformations.
High confidenceFrederick Winslow Taylor
American mechanical engineer and originator of scientific management.
Limited evidenceHenry Elsner Jr.
American sociologist, author of the 1962 dissertation and 1967 book on Technocracy Inc.
Limited evidenceHoward Scott
Founder and Director-in-Chief of Technocracy Inc. from 1933 until his death.
Limited evidenceIsabelle Anguelovski
Urban planning researcher on environmental justice and green gentrification, lead author of the 2022 Nature Communications study of 28 cities.
Qualified confidence
Jacob Burckhardt
Swiss cultural historian whose study of the Italian Renaissance treats the state as a work of art.
Qualified confidenceImage credit
Unbekannt · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
James C. Scott
Political scientist and anthropologist of agrarian societies, known for work on state legibility and local practical knowledge.
Qualified confidenceImage credit
SOAS University of London · CC BY 3.0 · Wikimedia Commons
James Lowe
Author of the Incubator for AI’s Redbox reflections, credited there as Head of AI Engineering.
High confidenceJason Furman
American economist at Harvard, former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers.
Limited evidence
Jean Le Tavernier
Flemish manuscript illuminator associated with Oudenaarde and the Burgundian court; the collection attributes its scribe portrait to him.
Qualified confidenceImage credit
Illumination by Jean Le Tavernier showing Jean Miélot presenting a translation to Philip the Good, circa 1454. This depicts his work, not the artist himself.Miniature by Jean le Tavernier; Bibliothèque Royale, Brussels, Ms. 9092, fol. 1 recto. · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
Jean Miélot
Author, translator, scribe and priest, secretary to Philip the Good of Burgundy, and the subject of one of the best-known portraits of a medieval scribe at work.
Qualified confidenceImage credit
Jean Le Tavernier · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
Jean-Philippe Vassal
French architect, co-founder of Lacaton & Vassal and joint 2021 Pritzker laureate.
High confidenceJeremy Bentham
English philosopher and legal reformer, a central figure in utilitarianism and codification.
Qualified confidenceJohannes Gutenberg
German goldsmith and printer, whose movable-type press removed the bottleneck on dissemination that the essay takes as its historical analogue.
Qualified confidenceJohn Boughton
Social historian of council housing, author of the Municipal Dreams blog and of books on the subject.
Qualified confidenceJohn Okey
Parliamentarian army officer and regicide, arrested in the Netherlands in 1662 and executed in London.
Qualified confidenceJohn Ruskin
English art critic and writer on architecture and society, author of The Seven Lamps of Architecture.
High confidenceJoshua Haldeman
Canadian chiropractor and research director of Technocracy Inc. in Canada in the late 1930s; grandfather of Elon Musk.
Limited evidenceLeon Henderson
American economist, briefly associated with the Columbia technocrats, later head of the wartime Office of Price Administration.
Limited evidenceLiam Wilkinson
Engineer working on AI in and around government, and the author of the essays this collection supports.
Qualified confidenceM. King Hubbert
American geophysicist, early member of Technocracy Inc., known for predicting the peak of US oil production.
Limited evidence
Mariana Mazzucato
Economist whose work on public-sector capability helps frame the essay’s argument about institutions learning by building.
High confidenceImage credit
AlexTaffetani · CC BY 3.0 · Wikimedia Commons
Martin Luther
German theologian and reformer whose Ninety-five Theses circulated through print.
Qualified confidenceImage credit
Lucas Cranach the Elder · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
Neel Nanda
Researcher whose biography, checked in October 2026, describes him as leading mechanistic interpretability at Google DeepMind.
Qualified confidence
Niccolò Machiavelli
Florentine official and political theorist, whose Discourses argue that republics survive by returning to their founding principles.
Qualified confidenceImage credit
Santi di Tito · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
Owen Hatherley
British writer on architecture, cities and politics, author of Modern Buildings in Britain.
High confidence
René Magritte
Belgian surrealist painter, whose Not to be Reproduced and Golconda open and close the essay.
Qualified confidenceImage credit
Unknown author Unknown author Restored by Giovanni Cardinali · CC0 1.0 · Wikimedia Commons
Robert Walpole
First Lord of the Treasury from 1721 to 1742, and by convention the first British prime minister, an office he denied holding.
High confidenceImage credit
Jean-Baptiste van Loo · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
Rosie Collington
Political economist and co-author, with Mariana Mazzucato, of The Big Con.
High confidenceSalvador Allende
President of Chile from 1970 until his death in the coup of 11 September 1973.
Limited evidenceSir George Downing, 1st Baronet
English diplomat and Treasury official who served the Commonwealth and then Charles II, and developed Downing Street in the 1680s.
High confidence
Stafford Beer
British management cybernetician, author of the Viable System Model, and chief designer of Project Cybersyn.
Qualified confidenceImage credit
Universitätsarchiv St.Gallen | CC-BY-SA 4.0 · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons
Stanley Kubrick
American film director, whose Dr. Strangelove supplies the CivBench essay with its recurring imagery.
Qualified confidenceImage credit
Phillip A. Harrington, an American photographer and staffer for Look magazine between 1949–1971 · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
Tacitus
Roman senator and historian, whose Annals supply the observation that laws multiply as a state becomes corrupt.
Qualified confidenceImage credit
Eighteenth-century depiction of Tacitus; not a contemporary likeness.Unknown author Unknown author · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
Tom Forth
Leeds-based writer on data, regional growth and transport, who has argued for local control and local tax-raising powers for English cities.
Qualified confidenceViktor Glushkov
Soviet mathematician and director of the Institute of Cybernetics in Kyiv, chief designer of OGAS.
Limited evidence
Virginia Eubanks
Political scientist who writes on how automated eligibility, scoring and prediction systems fall on poor and working-class people in the United States.
High confidenceImage credit
Sebastiaan ter Burg from Utrecht, The Netherlands · CC BY 2.0 · Wikimedia Commons
Walter Rautenstrauch
Head of industrial engineering at Columbia University who hosted the Energy Survey of North America in 1932.
Limited evidence
Ward Cunningham
American programmer, inventor of the wiki, and the origin of the debt metaphor in software engineering.
Qualified confidenceImage credit
© Raimond Spekking / CC BY-SA 4.0 (via Wikimedia Commons) · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons
William Coxe
English historian and clergyman, biographer of Sir Robert Walpole.
Qualified confidenceImage credit
William Thomas Fry · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
Yanis Varoufakis
Greek economist and former finance minister, author on technofeudalism.
Limited evidenceZach Katz
Musician and street-design campaigner who launched Better Streets AI in 2022, using an image model to redesign photographs of streets.
Qualified confidence
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