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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]It’s a tough task guessing who will be remembered in 100 years, because sometimes luck and other unpredictable factors play in just as much as importance of contribution or amount of fame in their lifetimes. I’ve read plenty of articles talking about how someone I’ve never heard of was a HUGE, widely popular intellectual of a their decade.

I don’t know politics or philosophy well enough to give examples, but I do read a lot. A few years ago, I stumbled into an Edna Ferber phase and tore through most of her novels. I had heard of a few titles — mostly because they become movies — but barely knew her name as an author. Turns out she was massively popular in the first half of the 20th century, won a Pulitzer, wrote some famous Broadway plays, and nearly all of her books were made into big-name movies. Meanwhile, The Great Gatsby was not a popular or critical success in its time and took off later partly because a group that sent books to WWII soldiers picked it as a nice, short novel they thought soldiers could easily carry around. Which do you think someone in the 1930s would have predicted to be popular today?[/quote]

OP here. I think it's difficult for novels for sure. Even in other fields, it's hard to know which ideas will fall out of favor with time. For context, I was reading about Saul Kripke and Eric Hobsbawm this week and how they are credited (sometimes controversially) with making huge contributions in their fields.

Got me thinking who might those people be now. Maybe some artificial intelligence scholar.[/quote]

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