A Note from the Chairman: March 2026

Dr. Richard Smith, FSC Chairman

A Note from the Chairman: March 2026

Dear FSC Friends,

Over the past several months, I've been spending a great deal of time in the archives.

What has struck me most is not just the content, but the intelligence behind it. When you read FSC Founder Edward R. Dewey's work closely, you can feel it. There is a kind of disciplined intuition at work – a capacity to perceive patterns in time that is hard to explain, especially when you remember that he was working without any of the tools we have today. How he arrived at something like the 17.7-year war cycle, largely by hand, is extraordinary.

It is a reminder of what natural intelligence is capable of. By "natural" here, I mean something specific: Dewey was an embodied intelligence. The consequences were real for him. He had something to lose and something to prove. That is not a biographical footnote – it is the precondition for the kind of perception he brought to his work.

Today, we have artificial intelligence – effectively unlimited computational power. We can process vast datasets, test hypotheses instantly, and extend patterns across time and domains. And yet, on its own, AI produces very little that is meaningful. It generates output, but it does not understand. It does not choose. It does not bear consequences.

It is, in that precise sense, inconsequential. That doesn't mean that it isn't useful. It is incredibly useful. It just can't decide what matters.

I see this clearly in my own work with the archives. The models help me search, organize, and extend Dewey's work – but they don't bring it to life. What brings it to life is something else entirely: the moment when Dewey's intelligence connects with my own. When I can see what he was seeing. When the patterns begin to make sense not just abstractly, but personally – when they begin to matter. That is natural intelligence at work.

And it is only at that point that AI becomes truly useful – because now it is being directed. Now it is amplifying judgment rather than replacing it. Used this way, AI is not a substitute for intelligence; it is an instrument that points beyond itself toward the human inquiry it serves. The moment it is mistaken for anything more, it becomes an obstacle rather than a tool.

What is the key difference between natural and artificial intelligence as I'm describing it here? Natural intelligence operates in cycles – it anticipates, acts, receives feedback, and adjusts. It is always closing a loop. AI never closes a loop. It has no stake in the outcome.

Dewey and his colleagues obviously glimpsed something that was very important to them in the early decades of the twentieth century. Think about it. Dewey was the chief economist in the Hoover administration. He was joined by, just to name a few, the Secretary of the Smithsonian, the head of the Harvard Observatory, and the head of the Yale Geology Department.

They saw something. They saw cycles – that events are not simply random; that there is structure in how things unfold – structure that persists, recurs, and can, under the right conditions, be studied and understood. They recognized that this was something not yet well understood. They sought to understand it better.

It's not yet clear why their Herculean efforts to bring the question of cycles to the wider world did not achieve the historic results they hoped for. Over time, most of the founders fell away from the FSC, and it was mainly Dewey and his staff who carried on the quest. I have a hunch as to why.

I believe the world just wasn't yet ready for an integrated understanding of cycles. I believe we had to go through another 80-plus years of our fascination with mechanism and technology before we could return in earnest to the questions that motivated our founders.

Ironically, it is the very fruits of that complete immersion in mechanism and technology – namely, computers and AI – that are bringing us back to those same questions. The tool that epitomizes the age of mechanism has shown us, unmistakably, where mechanism ends. AI has created unprecedented capabilities to collect and analyze data for cycles, yes. But it has done more than that. It has brought us back to the question of what it means to be human – what it means to be part of natural intelligence.

I've been deeply moved by my work with the archives. It has given me a much deeper appreciation of the work of our predecessors. Their prescience was remarkable. It has also given me an appreciation of the extraordinary power of the new AI tools at our disposal today. The combination of those two inspirations has left me more convinced than ever that the FSC's founding questions were the right ones – and that we are finally equipped to pursue them seriously. We are not just preserving the past. We are testing it, extending it, and asking what it means.

Which brings me to the next logical step. If this work is to mature, it needs a place where it can be developed seriously – where results are made explicit, challenged, and built upon. That is the role we envision for a revived FSC Journal: not as a retrospective, but as a living record of inquiry grounded in both history and modern tools.

There is still much to do.

But for the first time in a long time, it feels like the pieces are beginning to come together.

Dr. Richard Smith
Chairman of the Board and Executive Director