On October 4, the US and 16 other countries endorsed the Kyoto Vision for a Golden Age of Science, calling for stronger scientific institutions, ambitious research and artificial intelligence to accelerate discovery. The phrase is striking because people usually name golden ages retrospectively.
Governments can create conditions for progress, but history decides whether an era deserves the title. In ninth-century Baghdad, scholars focused on immediate concerns: calculating, translating, observing and mapping the heavens.
What made the period extraordinary was not a declaration of intellectual greatness, but a concentration of curiosity, scholarship, patronage and institutions devoted to discovery. Greek learning met Arabic scholarship; Indian mathematics entered new intellectual settings.
Knowledge arrived from elsewhere, but rarely left unchanged. When I spoke at the Harvard Islamic Finance Conference in September, I returned to a word we use almost every day: algorithm.
Its origins lie in the Latinised name of Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, a scholar who worked in Baghdad. I found that inheritance both inspiring and uncomfortable.
How did a civilisation once known for producing knowledge become, in so many fields, a consumer of technologies developed elsewhere? Al-Khwarizmi did not invent modern artificial intelligence.
His work travelled far enough to enter the vocabulary of a technological world he could never have imagined. The lesson is that intellectual influence comes from producing something others find valuable enough to study, develop and carry forward.
That is what I mean by Golden Age 2.0: not recreating Baghdad, but recovering the ambition to contribute. The question has grown urgent because the relationship between knowledge, capital, and productive power is changing.
AI is altering access to certain forms of expertise. Biology increasingly intersects with data and machine intelligence.
Robotics carries software into the physical economy. Tokenisation introduces new ways to represent ownership and financial claims.
Meanwhile, these technologies' energy demands remind us that the digital economy remains deeply physical. The starting point for participation is changing too.
Geography once restricted access to the right library, laboratory or scientific community. The internet weakened some barriers; AI may weaken others by putting sophisticated analytical assistance within reach of people who could never have assembled equivalent expertise internally.
Universities, laboratories and physical infrastructure remain indispensable.