Examples:

By far my favorite, More is Different by P.W. Anderson: https://www.tkm.kit.edu/downloads/TKM1_2011_more_is_different_PWA.pdf

Rodney Brooks' Elephants Don't Play Chess also comes to mind: https://www2.cs.sfu.ca/~vaughan/teaching/894/papers/elephants.pdf

Another example is On proof and progress in mathematics, William P. Thurston: https://arxiv.org/pdf/math/9404236.pdf

And if non-paper essays counts, Sutton's The Bitter Lesson is also quite a good read: http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html