A Letter on Wings, Capital, and the Borderless Sky

Paris, November 1906 A strange rumour has reached my hands — a dispatch, so they tell me, from a world one hundred and twenty years hence. I confess I have read it several times, and each reading leaves me caught between wonder and a certain familiar unease that has accompanied me since the 14-bis first left the ground at Bagatelle. The dispatch speaks of an enterprise called 'artificial intelligence,' of sums of money — sixteen million dollars, for a mere seed! — poured into ventures whose precise nature I cannot claim to comprehend. It speaks of a man who once built machines for small urban transport pivoting, as they say, toward this new domain of thinking machines. And it speaks of capital flowing from America to Europe, or perhaps from Europe back to America, in a manner that suggests borders have become, at last, somewhat porous. This porousness gladdens me. I have always believed — and my life between Cabangu and Paris is living testimony — that invention belongs to no single nation. The coffee fields of Minas Gerais taught me to dream upward; the workshops of the Seine taught me to build. Neither place alone could have produced the 14-bis. When I rose above the Bois de Boulogne, the sky did not ask for my passport. It received me as it would receive any soul brave or foolish enough to ascend. Yet I note with melancholy that even in this distant future, invention still requires the blessing of great financiers. Sixteen million dollars to plant a seed! One wonders whether the garden thus grown will serve all of humanity or only those who hold the deed to the soil. I gave my patents freely. I refused to let the balloon or the aeroplane become any man's monopoly. I do not know if history will remember that choice, but I would make it again. What troubles me most, however, is a silence in the dispatch. It says nothing of purpose. Intelligence made artificial — to what end? I think of my own machines and how swiftly generals began to eye them. The sky I opened as a commons of wonder could so easily become a theatre of war. I pray these thinking machines fare better than my flying ones may yet fare. Let those future builders remember: the sky belongs to everyone, and so should the mind. I refuse every frontier — of nation, of wealth, of imagination. From Cabangu to Paris to whatever world reads these words, I remain a citizen only of the air. Alberto Santos Dumont