When AI takes knowledge beyond human scale, the number of plausible futures expands dramatically. This is not because the world becomes more random, but because more options become visible. As knowledge is continuously interpreted and synthesized across domains, new combinations, pathways, and secondary effects emerge faster than humans can naturally track. The future stops narrowing on its own.
Continue readingFuture Scenarios
The Three Drivers That Push Civilizations Across Thresholds
The earlier posts introduced the sense that the world’s operating logic is beginning to shift, explored what compression feels like in daily life, and laid out the four-stage pattern that has shaped every major transition in history. Post Four explained why those transitions do not come from singular breakthroughs but from the interaction of multiple domains moving together. Before we can measure that interaction in today’s world, we need to understand the deeper forces that give convergence its power. These forces have shaped every civilizational transition across the long arc of history. They determine when pressure accumulates, how tightly systems couple, and what pushes society toward a threshold.
Why No Single Force Changes The World
RECAP FROM THE SERIES SO FAR
In the first post, I described the sense that the world’s operating logic is turning over. In the second, I explored what that feels like in daily life — the tightening, the pressure, the sense that everything is connected. The third post revealed the pattern beneath these moments: a four-stage rhythm of accumulation, compression, instability, and reordering that has shaped every major transition in history.
This post turns to a deeper question. If these shifts are so powerful, what triggers them? The answer is rarely what we expect.
Continue readingHow Big Shifts Unfold — And Where We Are Now
RECAP FROM THE SERIES SO FAR
In the first post, I explored why so many parts of life feel unsettled at the same time: all seven domains of civilization are active and amplifying one another. In the second post, I described the tightening that happens before major shifts — the compression that makes events feel more connected, faster, and harder to absorb. This post turns to the deeper structure beneath these shifts. When we look at history, we see a repeating pattern in how civilizations change shape.
Continue readingWhy Everything Feels Like It’s Changing At Once
Recap from Last Post
I opened this series by exploring why the world feels unsettled in ways that don’t fit the usual explanations. I introduced the idea of systemic change: moments when multiple parts of civilization become active at the same time, pushing and amplifying one another. I described today as a phase of compression, where pressures build across domains faster than old structures can absorb them. This post will bring that idea down to everyday experience. What do phase transitions feel like in normal life?
Continue readingThe Ambient City: When Intelligence Becomes Infrastructure
Across every domain I have explored – from education and energy to health, governance, and human longevity – one pattern keeps reappearing whenever society encounters a General Purpose Technology. These are the rare breakthroughs that do not simply make us more efficient but fundamentally restructure how civilization operates. Language, writing, the printing press, the steam engine, and electricity each changed not only what we did, but who we became. Artificial intelligence may join that lineage.
Continue readingLearning in the Age of AI
I recently wrote about the evolution of learning. A recent article takes this conversation further. Here is a short summary:
Continue readingLearning’s Next Phase, Captured On Video
Yesterday, I explored a powerful story: how human learning has evolved from vertical to horizontal, and now toward something even more transformative – ambient.
For most of history, learning was vertical, flowing down through families and traditions. The rise of schools, books, and digital platforms expanded it horizontally, allowing knowledge to move sideways across communities and institutions. But today, a new phase is emerging: ambient learning. In this model, knowledge doesn’t just pass down or across – it surrounds us. Supported by AI, sensors, and connected environments, learning becomes ever-present, context-aware, and seamlessly woven into daily life.
Continue readingThe Evolution Of Learning: From Vertical To Horizontal To Ambient
For most of human history, learning was vertical. Knowledge flowed downward, generation to generation, through families and traditions. A farmer taught his child the rhythms of the land, a craftsperson trained an apprentice at the workbench, a parent passed on rituals of faith and culture. The family was the classroom, and survival depended on what could be remembered and repeated.
Continue readingFrom Apps To Avatars: The Four Stages Shaping Banking’s AI Future
For decades, banking has been a place you go, a brand you see, and an interaction you initiate. In this current state, even though much of it is now digital, the model still revolves around channels – apps, websites, and branches – where customers show up to make things happen. AI has entered the picture in narrow, tactical ways: a fraud alert here, a chatbot there, a dashboard with basic insights. Helpful, yes – but far from transformational.
Continue readingWhy The Healthspan Gap Belongs On the SXSW 2026 Agenda
Last month, I wrote a piece for Time titled The Issue with Living Longer. In it, I explored a sobering reality: while global life expectancy continues to rise, the experience of those added years often falls short of what we imagine. Instead of extra time spent thriving, many people are spending those years managing chronic illness, cognitive decline, or financial instability.
Continue readingMapping Possibilities: The Stories That Shape What Comes Next
This blog series is more than a collection of observations. It’s a way of seeing. A way of holding space for the deep human shifts unfolding around us—and telling the stories that make those shifts real. From cognitive decline to fertility collapse, from extended lifespans to rising caregiving demands, each post in this series centers a human truth: that the future does not arrive all at once. It emerges through patterns, decisions, tensions, and tradeoffs. It emerges through people. And it emerges unevenly.
Continue readingInvisible at Rush Hour
What it feels like to grow old in a society speeding past you.
The World Is Getting Older—Fast
Across the globe, populations are aging at unprecedented speed. By 2030, more than 1 in 6 people worldwide will be over 60. In countries like Japan, South Korea, Italy, and Germany, that number will be closer to 1 in 3. The dependency ratio is tipping. Pensions are under strain. Healthcare systems are overwhelmed. And in many cities, there are now more people leaving the workforce than entering it.
Continue readingThe Year the Playground Went Quiet
What falling fertility rates are telling us – and where the silence leads
Across the globe, people are having fewer children – and having them later, if at all.
Fertility rates are falling in nearly every major economy, and not just slightly. In country after country, birth rates have slipped well below the 2.1 births per woman needed to maintain a stable population. South Korea now sits below 0.8. Japan, Italy, Spain, and China all hover below 1.4. Even in the United States – long a statistical outlier – births have declined steadily for over a decade, hitting a 30-year low during the pandemic.
Continue readingWhat Happens When the World Stops Trusting the Dollar?
If you’ve followed my work, you know I don’t do panic. I look for patterns—quiet shifts beneath the noise. Kenneth Rogoff’s new book, Our Dollar, Your Problem, is one of those rare signals that cuts through. It’s not about predicting collapse. It’s about asking: What happens when the system we all rely on gets stretched too far?
Continue readingWhen AI Keeps Culture Alive
Last week, I shared the vignette “Cooking with Grandma’s Digital Twin”, a glimpse into a future shaped by memory preservation and AI companions. It was the first in a new series of narratives designed to humanize the complex forces shaping our future. These vignettes are part of a broader foresight approach I have called possibility chains – connected sets of plausible developments within a single theme or driver of change.
Continue readingFrom Sense And Respond To Anticipate and Influence
In my recent post, Sense and Respond: A Survival Trait for a Converging World, I explored how the ability to detect and react to change in real time has become essential to survival. As convergence accelerates the pace of disruption across industries, systems, and geographies, the ability to sense what’s happening and respond effectively is no longer optional. It has become a core operating principle for organizations navigating uncertainty. But as the landscape continues to evolve, a deeper strategic shift is emerging—one that calls us to go beyond reacting quickly and begin shaping what comes next.
Continue readingSense And Respond: A Survival Trait For A Converging World
In an era shaped by accelerating change, convergence across domains, and an ever-expanding possibility space, traditional methods of prediction and planning have become increasingly inadequate. The static nature of scenario planning—once a cornerstone of strategic foresight—fails to keep pace with the velocity and complexity of today’s world. What’s needed instead is a living, breathing approach. One that adapts, evolves, and acts in real time.
Continue readingWinston Churchill’s Famous Words
Winston Churchill’s famous words – “History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it myself” – are not simply a reflection of confidence or political legacy. They represent a profound truth: that those who step forward to shape the future ultimately influence how history remembers the past.
Continue readingFrom Campfires To Code: The Systemic Shifts That Shaped Humanity
Human history has been anything but linear. While centuries can pass with relative stability, there are rare moments where everything changes—moments where converging forces across domains give rise to entirely new paradigms. These are not just periods of change. They are systemic transitions that reshape how we live, work, relate, and make sense of the world.
Continue reading
Reimagining the Future 