We might say the same about our New Caste, of their sense of the massive datascape on which we all sail and operate. They too head off to test their skills at coding, encryption, system design. They are almost all auto-didact - self taught as programmers or hackers or AI designers or investors. There is no established path to power for them, no route that has been marked before. No wonder the greatest figures of the era are college dropouts. This is a group that looks largely ahead: Their work demands constant upgrade. Every device is shipped imperfect. It’s not to say they are completely denuded of the Sixth Sense. That their feeling for history has been stripped. But if to be honestly in love with version 1.0 of your product and then to shred it for version 2,0 does demand a certain ahistoric distance. The New Caste explorers have a hunger for fresh worlds and landscapes. To get there they endure privations of long isolation - not so extreme as a long ship journey —- but they burrow deeper and deeper into systems, construct new links and new gates, in closed rooms. “When building machine learning systems, making good decisions is a strategic skill,” the computer scientist Andrew Ng has said. “Every day you wake up and you are in some totally unique situation that no one in the planet has been in before. It’s not a fact, there’s no procedure.” 16 This is our world now. No fact, yet. No procedure. A totally unique situation that demands a fresh instinct. We can follow Goethe into our own age: No one who has not seen and felt himself surrounded on all sides by networks can honestly understand. If that motto of the last great epochal shift was Dare to Know, it was certainly enacted by the sea captains. Discovery and risk were nothing but a nervy kind of scientific experiment, where the laboratory was the Earth’s surface and the tools of calculation were ships. And in our age? If we’re right that our historic mandate is Dare to Connect, well the New Caste is certainly