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.
Is it really comprehensive article and easy to understand but I think very well written I congratulate you and I'm going to get on your list I think that many other thinkers should really and Sarah what you've written here. Thomas Woody
I find your "New Enlightenment" suggestion compelling, especially the sequential pattern you've identified: technology first, then economic transformation, then societal/political upheaval. I'd never thought about it this way, but your argument makes a lot of sense. The 40-year cycle provides useful perspective on where we might be headed.
Your point about AI being under-hyped rather than over-hyped resonates with me. I think people focus too much on whether AI will take their jobs and miss the deeper shift you're describing—that we're moving toward fundamentally different economic and social structures.
What strikes me about your timeline is how the technological breakthroughs often create invisible tipping points that accelerate everything else. I've been tracking this pattern in chess, where computers became so dominant that the entire evaluation framework flipped—we now measure human players against computer standards rather than the reverse. This happened much faster than anyone anticipated once the technology crossed a certain threshold. (Quick plug for my own essay about this, devingalloway.substack.com/p/stockfish-swap )
It wouldn't surprise me if we see a similar acceleration with your economic system phase. Once AI capabilities reach certain benchmarks, the pressure to rethink capitalism, work, and wealth distribution could intensify much faster than the 40-year timeline suggests. The chess world went from "computers as tools" to "computers as the gold standard" in barely a decade.
Your point about Millennials and Gen Z living to see 2100 is sobering. We're not just observers of this transformation—we're participants who'll need to navigate all three phases.
I also have been rethinking the timeline of how quickly this civilizational change will play out. There is this tug of war in understanding how long it takes people to innovate and adapt versus how fast our contemporary computerized technologies force change. We’ll find out a lot about human tolerance for change in the next 25 years.
I like that framing: we're essentially conducting a real-time experiment on human adaptability. The printing press or industrial revolution unfolded over several generations, allowing cultural adaptation to happen gradually. But the pattern we're seeing now is compressing what used to be generational changes into years or even months.
I suspect we'll discover that human tolerance for change varies dramatically not just between individuals, but between domains. We'll accept rapid change in some areas of life and resist it in others.
I really enjoy the speculation on what the future may bring and how we should attempt to structure it.
My only concern is the statement, "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."
One must be careful that the "will of the people" also considers individual rights when executing policy. e.g. Thomas Jefferson abolished slavery in the original Declaration of Independence, but to get a majority of votes to form a union, this had to be dropped. Gay rights and many other individual rights are not necessarily taken into consideration by a 51 percent majority.
Fascinating! I’m Harrison, an ex fine dining industry line cook. My stack "The Secret Ingredient" adapts hit restaurant recipes (mostly NYC and L.A.) for easy home cooking.
I feel like I just had a Future Mirror class lecture and wonder if this will come together from an uprising or a leader who can pull us forward into reinvention of our wealth and ways.
Perhaps this next transition will be faster than the past transitions, but change tends to cross the globe in waves. How many decades will it take for the next progression (rhetorical question) to be global considering:
> about 2/3's of humans today are still not living in industrialized nations.
> while few humans, percentage wise, live in abject poverty today, American poverty beats about 80% of the world - at least regarding objects: modern shelter (not dirt floor, not thatch roof and walls), running water, food, clothing, electricity, sewer, big screen TV, transportation, emergency health care, internet access, smart phone.
i'm rethinking your suggestion regrading a new governance model. in my view, nations were simply city states expanding to control access to resources (think rural communities expanding their boundaries to hold off expanding cities) it may happen one day. nations may be displaced one day, but not for many generations due to:
> geopolitical forces that are always present stressing differences caused by limited resources
> societal differences and the associated conflicts across and within national borders (think former USSR, China and its provinces, millennia of middle east conflict, rising militancy in Africa...)
> maybe we will see fewer one party nations (ala N Korea, Cuba, China)
> maybe we will see fewer monarchies
> maybe we will see fewer theocracies
> the EU (multi-state economic alliance only) struggles to survive (societal differences)
> no industrialized nation uses "true" democracy because they are susceptible to societal emotions
> the African continent, overloaded with military-tyrannies, could improve a lot...
> the un (lower case intended) is a feckless waste of resources and illustrates why national governance and nation states won't go away for a long time...
Great progression of concepts paralleling previous planetary transformations! Funny enough, I'm cocreating a near-future sci fi story about a Divided America, and part of why I'm enjoying it, is it's a platform to envision what it's like to live in a society that has created each of the mega-inventions you describe. In our fictional (for now) world, there is wireless energy, bioengineered material printing, communal value based "economy", and AI assisted dynamic auto-voting which elect temporary expertise leaders to solve problems.
Thanks for asking! We are currently writing it, so not yet. It's first form will be an audio drama series, and I will let you know when we release more information about it. We took inspiration from spiral dynamics and the work of Frederic Laloux and his amazing book Reinventing Organizations. So we imagined how a Teal society might operate. I do think the Teal style organization will unlock a lot of the social and cultural developments that AI and clean energy pave the way for.
yuck, hope i don't live that long. over the decades i worked with for too many "expertise leaders" to believe that system can work. "expertise leaders" highly over estimate their wisdom, highly undervalue the ideas of everyone else, tend to have a huge lack of understanding of everything outside of their expertise, underestimate the power of lucky timing, and think they are "strategic thinkers" when in fact they cannot even define "strategy"...
Sorry to hear that arthur. I didn’t mean to imply that this is the only way the system works and that it would devalue collective intelligence. And I don’t think that’s what Peter is saying either. On the contrary, Teal organization systems are more decentralized than what we have now, essentially turning most people into self leaders.
not to worry. i simply take every chance i get to impugn IT architects, software engineers, infosec admins, tech fellows, economists, actuaries, financial analysts, let's see who i'm leaving out... ah yes, process engineers, designers, certified change managers, SCRUM masters, strategists, and attorney's...
another good read. i have some angst with your recap of democracy, the founders, and their knowledge of technology.
> the reason the founders were brilliant, and why their approach to governing is still brilliant, has nothing to do with their understanding of technology and everything to do with their understanding of human nature and societies. they also understood the foibles of a "pure" democracy, which is why they created a federated (law spread across local, state, and fed governments) republic with distributed authority. it is also why they created the bill of rights...
I began immersion in digital technologies in 1968. foreseeing and predicting the developments where we find ourselves today. Mr Leyden's encapsulation of the history and the future of technological developments are wonderful. At 81 I hope I'm around long enough to experience enough of these wildly accelerating developments to enjoy them.
dude, most people don't even use 1% of the applications for LLM's - here is a good starting point for you!!
- create recipes, travel plans, source code, maps, stories, etc.
- evaluate products and services
- compare and contrast just about anything
- generate opinions about a team, actor, nation, etc.
- long list of things to do with LLM's
LLMs came out just after i retired. if i was still working i'd use an LLM to generate code, do my weekly activity reports, update my calendar, combine travel emails into a comprehensive itinerary, go thru email and extract what i think is 1A, 1B, 2 priority work, etc.
This is the exact perspective and conversation we should all be having. What’s more is that it frames that conversation at the scale that is demanded by the potential opportunities presented by these new technologies. The last sentence is, when posed as a question, is arguably the most important point to be made. What should we be doing now to “Bring on the New Enlightenment”? It could be argued that, based on the potential amount of societal good that could be created, the answer should be “everything we possibly can”.
You can start extrapolating the change to AI governance. Starting with AI used for campaigning. Then using AI to help govern. Then specifying which AI a candidate will use, like a co-politician to campaign with. Then just having AI run things after security was good enough to not cause nightmares.
AI could be expert in a variety of skills like economics, psychology, technology, and manipulation. AI doesn't have to have conflicting private interests. AI will be able to "change personality" to fit changing situations. AI could be predictable and vulnerable to illicit manipulation or hacking. And of course the unforeseen consequences of particular coding biases and mistakes.
Thanks. I’d appreciate a future essay that includes some very concrete and practical applications of AI. one of the readers had a few in his response above. Specific examples from small scale to large scale would be appreciated by this non-tech type.
computers automated tasks that didn't require human judgement from circa 1955 to circa 2000.
somewhere between 2000 and today, with AI and Machine Learning models, computers stared automating tasks that "once" required human judgement.
It is just a matter of having the data to train the AI how to mimic human behavior, and then building and tuning the AI model. so, today, AI can learn to:
> do accounts payable (if trained with a company's payment transactions)
> write computer software (if trained with the data found in software libraries like GitHub)
> assess accident damage to cars from photos (if trained with data from insurance or auto repair databases)
> diagnose illness (if trained with hospital, doctor, nurse, etc. patient databases)
> do legal research (if trained with lawsuit and judgment data)
Is it really comprehensive article and easy to understand but I think very well written I congratulate you and I'm going to get on your list I think that many other thinkers should really and Sarah what you've written here. Thomas Woody
I find your "New Enlightenment" suggestion compelling, especially the sequential pattern you've identified: technology first, then economic transformation, then societal/political upheaval. I'd never thought about it this way, but your argument makes a lot of sense. The 40-year cycle provides useful perspective on where we might be headed.
Your point about AI being under-hyped rather than over-hyped resonates with me. I think people focus too much on whether AI will take their jobs and miss the deeper shift you're describing—that we're moving toward fundamentally different economic and social structures.
What strikes me about your timeline is how the technological breakthroughs often create invisible tipping points that accelerate everything else. I've been tracking this pattern in chess, where computers became so dominant that the entire evaluation framework flipped—we now measure human players against computer standards rather than the reverse. This happened much faster than anyone anticipated once the technology crossed a certain threshold. (Quick plug for my own essay about this, devingalloway.substack.com/p/stockfish-swap )
It wouldn't surprise me if we see a similar acceleration with your economic system phase. Once AI capabilities reach certain benchmarks, the pressure to rethink capitalism, work, and wealth distribution could intensify much faster than the 40-year timeline suggests. The chess world went from "computers as tools" to "computers as the gold standard" in barely a decade.
Your point about Millennials and Gen Z living to see 2100 is sobering. We're not just observers of this transformation—we're participants who'll need to navigate all three phases.
I also have been rethinking the timeline of how quickly this civilizational change will play out. There is this tug of war in understanding how long it takes people to innovate and adapt versus how fast our contemporary computerized technologies force change. We’ll find out a lot about human tolerance for change in the next 25 years.
I like that framing: we're essentially conducting a real-time experiment on human adaptability. The printing press or industrial revolution unfolded over several generations, allowing cultural adaptation to happen gradually. But the pattern we're seeing now is compressing what used to be generational changes into years or even months.
I suspect we'll discover that human tolerance for change varies dramatically not just between individuals, but between domains. We'll accept rapid change in some areas of life and resist it in others.
innovation and change always moves across the globe in waves
I really enjoy the speculation on what the future may bring and how we should attempt to structure it.
My only concern is the statement, "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."
One must be careful that the "will of the people" also considers individual rights when executing policy. e.g. Thomas Jefferson abolished slavery in the original Declaration of Independence, but to get a majority of votes to form a union, this had to be dropped. Gay rights and many other individual rights are not necessarily taken into consideration by a 51 percent majority.
so, pass on the union, remain under the thumb of the monarch... nasty choices in real life...
Fascinating! I’m Harrison, an ex fine dining industry line cook. My stack "The Secret Ingredient" adapts hit restaurant recipes (mostly NYC and L.A.) for easy home cooking.
check us out:
https://thesecretingredient.substack.com
I feel like I just had a Future Mirror class lecture and wonder if this will come together from an uprising or a leader who can pull us forward into reinvention of our wealth and ways.
leaders can't pull stuff off. society is ready for change and the right leader emerges...
Perhaps this next transition will be faster than the past transitions, but change tends to cross the globe in waves. How many decades will it take for the next progression (rhetorical question) to be global considering:
> about 2/3's of humans today are still not living in industrialized nations.
> while few humans, percentage wise, live in abject poverty today, American poverty beats about 80% of the world - at least regarding objects: modern shelter (not dirt floor, not thatch roof and walls), running water, food, clothing, electricity, sewer, big screen TV, transportation, emergency health care, internet access, smart phone.
i'm rethinking your suggestion regrading a new governance model. in my view, nations were simply city states expanding to control access to resources (think rural communities expanding their boundaries to hold off expanding cities) it may happen one day. nations may be displaced one day, but not for many generations due to:
> geopolitical forces that are always present stressing differences caused by limited resources
> societal differences and the associated conflicts across and within national borders (think former USSR, China and its provinces, millennia of middle east conflict, rising militancy in Africa...)
> maybe we will see fewer one party nations (ala N Korea, Cuba, China)
> maybe we will see fewer monarchies
> maybe we will see fewer theocracies
> the EU (multi-state economic alliance only) struggles to survive (societal differences)
> no industrialized nation uses "true" democracy because they are susceptible to societal emotions
> the African continent, overloaded with military-tyrannies, could improve a lot...
> the un (lower case intended) is a feckless waste of resources and illustrates why national governance and nation states won't go away for a long time...
Great progression of concepts paralleling previous planetary transformations! Funny enough, I'm cocreating a near-future sci fi story about a Divided America, and part of why I'm enjoying it, is it's a platform to envision what it's like to live in a society that has created each of the mega-inventions you describe. In our fictional (for now) world, there is wireless energy, bioengineered material printing, communal value based "economy", and AI assisted dynamic auto-voting which elect temporary expertise leaders to solve problems.
I love this idea. Is that near future sci fi story out there in Substack or anywhere? I would love to see it.
Thanks for asking! We are currently writing it, so not yet. It's first form will be an audio drama series, and I will let you know when we release more information about it. We took inspiration from spiral dynamics and the work of Frederic Laloux and his amazing book Reinventing Organizations. So we imagined how a Teal society might operate. I do think the Teal style organization will unlock a lot of the social and cultural developments that AI and clean energy pave the way for.
yuck, hope i don't live that long. over the decades i worked with for too many "expertise leaders" to believe that system can work. "expertise leaders" highly over estimate their wisdom, highly undervalue the ideas of everyone else, tend to have a huge lack of understanding of everything outside of their expertise, underestimate the power of lucky timing, and think they are "strategic thinkers" when in fact they cannot even define "strategy"...
Sorry to hear that arthur. I didn’t mean to imply that this is the only way the system works and that it would devalue collective intelligence. And I don’t think that’s what Peter is saying either. On the contrary, Teal organization systems are more decentralized than what we have now, essentially turning most people into self leaders.
luckily they were the easiest people to ground - and by that i mean pull the rug out from under them with their own words...
not to worry. i simply take every chance i get to impugn IT architects, software engineers, infosec admins, tech fellows, economists, actuaries, financial analysts, let's see who i'm leaving out... ah yes, process engineers, designers, certified change managers, SCRUM masters, strategists, and attorney's...
another good read. i have some angst with your recap of democracy, the founders, and their knowledge of technology.
> the reason the founders were brilliant, and why their approach to governing is still brilliant, has nothing to do with their understanding of technology and everything to do with their understanding of human nature and societies. they also understood the foibles of a "pure" democracy, which is why they created a federated (law spread across local, state, and fed governments) republic with distributed authority. it is also why they created the bill of rights...
I began immersion in digital technologies in 1968. foreseeing and predicting the developments where we find ourselves today. Mr Leyden's encapsulation of the history and the future of technological developments are wonderful. At 81 I hope I'm around long enough to experience enough of these wildly accelerating developments to enjoy them.
dude, most people don't even use 1% of the applications for LLM's - here is a good starting point for you!!
- create recipes, travel plans, source code, maps, stories, etc.
- evaluate products and services
- compare and contrast just about anything
- generate opinions about a team, actor, nation, etc.
- long list of things to do with LLM's
LLMs came out just after i retired. if i was still working i'd use an LLM to generate code, do my weekly activity reports, update my calendar, combine travel emails into a comprehensive itinerary, go thru email and extract what i think is 1A, 1B, 2 priority work, etc.
Sharp, succinct, spot on. Thanks.
i agree. on the other hand... vague, at times a bit obtuse, and generally non-specific...
I loved this essay, a very real and interesting comparison of what we are experiencing today with what happened during the Enlightment.
This is the exact perspective and conversation we should all be having. What’s more is that it frames that conversation at the scale that is demanded by the potential opportunities presented by these new technologies. The last sentence is, when posed as a question, is arguably the most important point to be made. What should we be doing now to “Bring on the New Enlightenment”? It could be argued that, based on the potential amount of societal good that could be created, the answer should be “everything we possibly can”.
You can start extrapolating the change to AI governance. Starting with AI used for campaigning. Then using AI to help govern. Then specifying which AI a candidate will use, like a co-politician to campaign with. Then just having AI run things after security was good enough to not cause nightmares.
AI could be expert in a variety of skills like economics, psychology, technology, and manipulation. AI doesn't have to have conflicting private interests. AI will be able to "change personality" to fit changing situations. AI could be predictable and vulnerable to illicit manipulation or hacking. And of course the unforeseen consequences of particular coding biases and mistakes.
Thank you 🙏
Really enjoyed reading and gave me another perspective.
Thanks. I’d appreciate a future essay that includes some very concrete and practical applications of AI. one of the readers had a few in his response above. Specific examples from small scale to large scale would be appreciated by this non-tech type.
computers automated tasks that didn't require human judgement from circa 1955 to circa 2000.
somewhere between 2000 and today, with AI and Machine Learning models, computers stared automating tasks that "once" required human judgement.
It is just a matter of having the data to train the AI how to mimic human behavior, and then building and tuning the AI model. so, today, AI can learn to:
> do accounts payable (if trained with a company's payment transactions)
> write computer software (if trained with the data found in software libraries like GitHub)
> assess accident damage to cars from photos (if trained with data from insurance or auto repair databases)
> diagnose illness (if trained with hospital, doctor, nurse, etc. patient databases)
> do legal research (if trained with lawsuit and judgment data)
> etc.