AI May Bring Civilizational-scale Change & The New Enlightenment

The last time we saw a step-change in human understanding and a wave of mega-inventions, we also saw the birth of a new civilization in The Enlightenment. Here we go again.

Some people think that artificial intelligence is over-hyped. They point to how little evidence we see of it having an impact on the economy or society and the general lack of change in the nature of work to date.

I think that artificial intelligence is actually under-hyped and that most people are not thinking nearly big enough about the scale of changes that will be coming in the next 25 years. I think we have to start thinking about the probability that civilizational-scale change lies just ahead of us.

The arrival of intelligent machines is a world-historic development that will give humans such a tremendous step-change in our capabilities that we will be able to fundamentally rework pretty much all aspects of our civilization.

As many are currently speculating, we will be able to reinvent the economy, society, and the nature of work. (Just give it more than two years, folks.) But we will also be able to rework many of our core institutions, including how we govern ourselves in democracies and how we coordinate between different political entities around the planet.

Artificial intelligence will give humans super-tools that dramatically expand what we currently know about ourselves, the world, the planet, and the universe. Human minds augmented with artificial minds will be able to see and understand things that we had absolutely no idea about until now.

AI will accelerate the development and use of other world-historic technologies, such as clean energy and bioengineering, that will impact us on a civilization scale, too. Being able to engineer all living things, from viruses to animals to ourselves, will set us apart from every other civilization in world history. The ability to take advantage of vast amounts of clean energy will also make us unique.

And, of course, in no other civilization have humans lived and worked side-by-side with intelligent machines.

The last time humans found themselves in such a fortuitous moment in history — the last time we created a new kind of civilization — was during The Enlightenment, the era from which the modern world was born.

We can see many striking parallels between what seems to be unfolding around us today and what happened during The Enlightenment, which took place in Western Europe and the United States from about 1680 to 1800.

That era witnessed the arrival of its own transformative new technology: the mechanical steam engine, which dramatically augmented the physical power of humans. That era also had a breakthrough in energy with coal mining at scale.

During The Enlightenment, the invention of financial capitalism and industrial production fundamentally reworked the economy. The creation of institutions for representative democracy gave us a new way to govern ourselves, while nation states gave us a new way to coordinate with entities around the planet.

The name “The Enlightenment” itself refers to the dramatic expansion of humans’ understanding of the world during this period. This increase in knowledge was partly enabled by new tools, like microscopes and telescopes. The people of that time thought of themselves as shining a light into fields that had previously been dark due to our ignorance, superstitions, or religious traditions.

I think we’re in a very similar moment today. So, to help us prepare for the civilization-scale change that looms on the horizon, I’m going to point out the many parallels between our era and the last time humans went through such a change.

We might be in the relatively early stages of what we someday may call “The New Enlightenment.” Hear me out.

The six mega-inventions of the new civilization birthed in The Enlightenment

All inventions are not equal. Some are such game-changers that they deserve to be put in a different league. Not all inventions are technologies or tools, either. Some of humanities’ most important inventions could be categorized as systems or institutions.

I use the term “mega-inventions” to set these breakthrough inventions apart from the rest, and the innovators of The Enlightenment came up with six of them, which you can see listed in the graphic to start this section.

These six mega-inventions changed civilization in profound ways, and the world we live in today is still rooted in all of them. However, after 250 years, they are getting long in the tooth and, in many cases, causing more problems than they are solving:

• Mechanical engines: Throughout every civilization that came before The Enlightenment, humans’ primary sources of power were their own physical muscles and the muscles of any animals they could domesticate. This put serious constraints on the amount of work they could do. But then came the mechanical steam engine. This game-changer invention could deliver the power of 20 horses (and eventually far more), which drove an enormous amount of productivity gains and economic growth. We would not have our prosperous modern world without it.

• Carbon Energies: Civilization needed an abundant energy source to fuel all those machines as they scaled up. Humans had been taking advantage of carbon-based energies since the discovery of fire, with wood being the first carbon-based fuel, but for industrial production, we needed a much more concentrated, more scalable energy source. We got it when we figured out how to mine coal deep within the Earth and, eventually, drill for oil and then natural gas. However, 300 years of burning these fuels and releasing their carbon into the atmosphere is warming the planet and causing climate change.

• Industrial Revolution: To take full advantage of the previous two mega-inventions, we needed to reorganize the economy with factories, assembly lines, and all kinds of innovations that we now just fold into two words: Industrial Revolution. But again, as great as industrial production was in creating new wealth, jobs, and prosperity, it created all kinds of pollution and waste that has screwed up the environment, too.

• Financial Capitalism: During The Enlightenment, we needed an economic system that could efficiently finance all that industrial production, so we invented financial capitalism. This system motivated people with money to invest it into worthy enterprises because they would often receive more money out of the investment than they put into it. This system took some of the brightest minds of the time to figure out — as “Master of the Royal Mint,” Isaac Newton, the genius who invented calculus, played a key role in developing this critical system for the British. However, after several centuries, this flywheel for making money has resulted in an elite class controlling vast amounts of wealth and wielding a disproportionate amount of power over the rest of society.

• Representative Democracy: This is the mega-invention that Americans can rightly claim as theirs. (The French also took a shot at it with their French Revolution, but they ended up in a dictatorship.) The fledgling United States of America came up with the first modern democracy, and it has now lasted for 250 years. The model was a fantastic improvement over the divine right of kings, but after two and a half centuries, the original design clearly needs an overhaul.

• Nation States: Before the Enlightenment, humanity had a long history of being organized around different systems — monarchies, tribes, empires, religions, feudalism, etc. — that were usually run by authoritarian male leaders. But during The Enlightenment, we came up with “nation states” — regions with sovereign borders and “international” rules governing how they could interact. Again, the nation state was a tremendous improvement over the previous options, but our current patchwork of hundreds of nations complicates any global efforts to coordinate collective action to solve climate change and other planetary issues today.

The long timeline for civilizational change and the relationship of the stages

One thing to note about the six mega-inventions above is that they fall into three different categories:

• Mechanical engines and carbon energies are technologies.

• The Industrial Revolution and financial capitalism are economic systems.

• Representative democracy and nation states are systems that have to do with politics and government. In short, you could say they have to do with society.

What’s striking is that those three categories happened in sequence, as you can see in the graphic to start this section. 

The first 40-year period had to do mostly with technological breakthroughs. Two people played key roles in the invention of the steam engine between 1680 and 1720. The first was Thomas Savery, who patented the first practical steam-powered device in England in 1698. Then, in 1712, Thomas Newcomen developed a much safer and more effective steam engine, and his was the model that became widely used.

The steam engine was initially invented to pump water out of the bottom of coal mines. Because of this, mines could be dug deeper, which gave us access to more coal, so those two mega-inventions were very synergistic and scaled-up alongside each other during that first stage.

The middle stage (1720 to 1760) saw more of the economic system inventions, which roughly built off the previous technological breakthroughs. Here you started to see early factory systems and assembly lines beginning to be figured out — this was mostly in England, but other places in Europe and even the American colonies were experimenting some, too.

The final period (1760 to 1800) saw political repercussions that were partly due to the profound economic changes triggered by the previous mega-inventions. This was the period of the American Revolution, starting with the Declaration of Independence in 1776. Here, a colony rebelled against a monarchy and insisted it be considered an independent nation state. Then, in 1789, you had the French Revolution, after which France made a run at being a democracy —but it ended when Napoleon Bonaparte seized power in a coup in 1799.

The general point to be made here is that fundamental technological breakthroughs set civilization-scale transformations in motion. The next wave of major changes focus on the economy that is adapting to the new technologies. And finally, if the changes are profound enough, they can drive social and political unrest that leads to new institutions and new ways of governing.

So, there’s your brief history lesson and reminders. But the whole point of this exercise is to highlight the striking parallels between The Enlightenment and our situation today.

Our comparable civilizational mega-inventions now and still in the future

A strong case can be made that we are now seeing (or will soon see) the transformative power of a comparable set of six mega-inventions. Each of these inventions, which are laid out in the graphic above, has a direct parallel from The Enlightenment era and, in fact, can be seen as superseding the previous mega-invention.

The first three have already arrived in nascent form, so it is easier to envision how they might play out in the coming decades. The other three are less developed, so talking about them is more speculative. But here’s how I would introduce all six:

• Artificial Intelligence: What the mechanical engine did to augment the physical power of humans, artificial intelligence does for our mental power. Since the beginning of civilization, anything that required intelligence also required a biological brain — even the simplest tasks. Until now. We now have machines that are intelligent, and in an increasing number of tasks, they perform as well as or better than humans. This is a huge step-change in the capabilities of humans. Artificial intelligence will not just augment but amplify what we are able to do in all directions, in all fields. We’re just now realizing the enormous potential of crossing that threshold.

• Clean Energies: We have developed the ability to create energy from a series of technologies — rather than from the carbon commodities that The Enlightenment civilization figured out how to exploit at scale — and the costs of technologies can be driven lower and lower until they get so cheap they are abundant. These technologies have little to no negative impact on the climate or environment, and even better ones, like fusion power, are on the horizon. Having access to vast amounts of clean, cheap energy will enable us to do previously impossible things. We can see the path to that future — and it’s not a long one.

• Biological Revolution: We also have cracked the basic foundations of bioengineering. We now understand genetics and how to engineer genomes, and we are coming to understand the biological world, including our own bodies and health, in more depth than ever before. We’re now on the brink of a Biological Revolution, one in which we will engineer living things to create materials and products that could supersede the materials and products of industrial production, including plastics, which take thousands of years to biodegrade. If done right, the Biological Revolution could be much more environmentally sustainable and much more in sync with nature than the Industrial Revolution. We have a long way to go here, but the rough outline of the way forward is taking shape.

• Sustainable Capitalism: Now we start getting into the mega-inventions that are still very murky and probably lie in the more distant future. I use the world “sustainable” here to mean both environmentally sustainable and socially sustainable. I think that the financial capitalism that has enriched a relatively tiny group of shareholders who own capital will be superseded by some different form of capitalism that will spread wealth more broadly through society. We’re in the early days of talking about the evolution from shareholder capitalism to stakeholder capitalism, but I think the coming shift will be even more profound. I also think that the arrival of artificial intelligence is going to be the primary driver of this fundamental rethinking of economics. As we sort through which intelligent jobs will be done by machines and which will be handled by humans, we will also have to fundamentally rethink the nature of income, what it means to earn a living, and what all human beings deserve. We have a lot of work ahead to figure this out.

• Digital Democracy: This mega-invention is murkier still and might take even longer to figure out. The model of representative democracy that America’s founders came up with 250 years ago is getting increasingly dysfunctional. These were smart people, but they didn't even know what electricity was (though Ben Franklin had some hunches), let alone electronics. The idea of intelligent machines as a reality would have never crossed their minds. Yet if those same smart founders were living today, they would almost certainly be looking at how they might use this amazing new tool to determine the will of the majority of Americans and then efficiently execute policy. I think that all Western democracies will get to the point where they will have to be fundamentally reinvented and that whatever they come up with will be rooted in digital technologies, probably using AI.

• Global Governance: This is another mega-invention that is still too early in development to say much about with certainty. But I can say with certainty that, with 10 billion people living on this one relatively small planet, we’re going to need much better ways to deal with global issues, such as climate change, pandemics, and all the other borderless challenges that we humans increasingly will face. I can also say that having 200 completely sovereign nation states doing whatever the hell they want to do — regardless of the impact on all the others — is going to be increasingly seen as a very bad idea. I’m not saying we’ll end up with a United Nations running the planet (such a 20th century notion), but if I had to speculate, artificial intelligence will play a big role in such complex planetary coordination.

The tech is behind us, but now we need the economic and societal system changes

For much of the last section, I kept making vague references to time, which is why I will end this essay with the timeline to start this section, which spans from 1980 to 2100.

Civilizational-scale change takes time because it involves people, and today’s human beings have not changed that much from how humans thought and felt and acted during The Enlightenment. In the end, no matter how quick the technology can roll out, human beings need to adopt them and innovate around them. That takes time. 

So, if we are talking about civilizational change, we should step back to look at a comparable 120-year span of time. From that perspective, you can see how our six mega-inventions may be emerging in a similar pattern to how they played out during The Enlightenment.

The period from 1980 to 2020 was mostly about the development of the key technologies that will set our civilization-scale transformation in motion. The year 1980 is roughly when we kicked off the Digital Age with the introduction of the personal computer. We then had 40 years of foundational work (the internet, mobile, cloud, etc.) to get to the crowning achievement of artificial intelligence.

That same period saw the development of clean energy technologies, such as solar, batteries, and electric cars. It took 40 years, but we are now at the point that these technologies are relatively inexpensive. Soon, they’ll be even cheaper and can start to scale. 

The same goes for bioengineering. In 1990, we launched the human genome project —nearly 15 years and $3 billion later, we sequenced the first human genome. We then spent nearly two decades driving down the price to the point that decoding a human genome now costs about $100.

We’re now entering the second 40-year period. This is the one where we develop new economic systems in response to the harnessing of these new technologies, which will fundamentally change the economies of developed and developing worlds. Eventually, this will lead to a new global economy that looks very different from the fragmented economic system we are dealing with now.

The next wave of changes to come after that will probably be to the institutions of democracies and nation states. When you widely distribute profoundly different new technologies and rework the economy in fundamental ways, you must inevitably change your politics and government, too.

If you think that the period from 2060 to 2100 is so far in the future that you don’t have to even think about it — think again. The Boomers and Gen Xers might not see 2100, but most Millennials and members of Gen Z will cross that milestone.

If you are still only concerned with the next 25 years, then I will offer this caution. I started thinking about the parallels between The Enlightenment and today — conceiving of The New Enlightenment and developing all these timelines and slides — before the arrival of generative AI and the true opening up of the AI Age.

In the last couple years, I have started to think that maybe the changes to the economy and society might come even sooner than I previously predicted. In other words, it’s possible that even the Boomers and the Gen Xers will be around when we see those last three mega-inventions transform civilization, or at least see some big strides towards them.

The technological changes we explore in The Great Progression: 2025 to 2050 may prove to be so disruptive that we have to accelerate inventing new forms of the economy and our democracy, and maybe even create some form of global governance before mid-century. It could be a pretty wild 25 years.

Bring on The New Enlightenment.