Life & Wisdom Quote by David Brin

“Fortunately” does a lot of quiet work here. Brin isn’t just praising diversity; he’s signaling relief that reality refuses to conform to anyone’s neat blueprint. Calling people “models” tilts the line toward the language of engineering, AI, and speculative design: humans as templates, datasets, prototypes. It’s a sly sci-fi move, framing personhood in the same terms you’d use for building systems, then insisting the raw material is messy, plural, and therefore useful.

The subtext is a critique of monocultures and one-size-fits-all fantasies, whether they come from technocrats, utopians, or would-be authoritarians. If you’re trying to build a society, an algorithm, or a future, uniformity is tempting: easier to predict, easier to optimize, easier to control. Brin flips that temptation. Diversity becomes not a moral poster slogan but a practical advantage - a safeguard against brittle thinking. A system trained on sameness fails the moment the world deviates. A culture that prizes one “ideal” human type tends to treat everyone else as error.

Contextually, this sits comfortably in Brin’s larger preoccupations: adaptation, open societies, accountability, and the suspicion of closed systems - themes running through his Uplift universe and his nonfiction about transparency and tech. The line also reads like a gentle warning to futurists: you can’t plan away the human factor, and you shouldn’t want to. The future won’t be saved by perfect people; it’ll be survived by varied ones.