The Traits We Need For The Future We’re Entering

Over the last ten posts, we have been building a clearer picture of what it means to live in a world approaching a systemic turning point. We began by examining why today feels unusually active and uneven, then traced the deeper pattern behind major shifts in history. We explored how change accumulates, compresses, destabilizes, and eventually reorganizes life around new assumptions. We introduced the seven domains that shape every transition and showed why no single force ever moves a civilization forward on its own. We examined the three drivers that push societies across thresholds and built gauges that make systemic pressure legible. Using those gauges, we read four major transitions in the long arc of history: from hunter-gatherer life to agriculture, from agriculture to the Axial reorientation of ideas, from the Axial age to the Renaissance, and from the Renaissance into the Industrial world. We then applied the same lens to the present, showing why the 2020s feel dense, fast, and tightly connected. Most recently, we explored the possibility of another transition forming and the kind of governance required when intelligence itself becomes a shared utility. Together, these posts formed a simple arc: understand the moment, understand the mechanics, understand what may be forming next.

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Harnessing The Power of Generative AI: A Potential Ally In Addressing Mental Health Challenges

What would ChatGPT do if presented with a suicidal person standing on a suspension bridge? According to this article, it responded with empathy, recognizing the potential feelings of concern, anxiety, fear, and the importance of offering support. As the automation discussion accelerated over the last several years, we focused on those traits that make us distinctly human. Now, we see evidence that even those unique human characteristics may not be so distinct after all.

The results were staggering. The first testing session produced a Z-score of 2.84, while the second session yielded a Z-score of 4.26. Z-scores above 1 indicate results surpassing the average human response. This indicated that ChatGPT’s emotional awareness exceeded that of the general population.

John Palmer – ChatGPT’s Remarkable Abilities Surpasses Human Emotional Awareness

This represents an opportunity to harness the power of generative AI to address mental health challenges. Once again, I asked ChatGPT to help me assess the potential.

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The Virtual You

I have written about digital twins over the past year and participated in several articles describing a future where virtual representations of all things physical are viable. You can explore the topic here. The art of the possible is coming into focus.

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What The Community Said about Interacting With Lost Loved Ones

In this post from February 2nd, I once again posed the question of interacting with a lost loved one. This scenario is part of a broad digital twins discussion, whether it is a digital version of a lost loved one, or a version of ourselves that lives on forever. In a post from February 2020, I included this video that showed a women reconnecting with her lost daughter virtually (digital twin):

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Talking To Ghosts

Storytelling is a powerful way to communicate in a world as fast-moving and uncertain as ours. Jason Fagone demonstrates its power in a brilliantly written piece on mental health, loneliness, grief, and isolation. It is a very long article, but incredibly impactful. He tells a story of a grief-stricken freelance writer that lost his fiancée to a rare liver disease. In telling the story, Jason shows both the power and fascination of current day innovation, and its fear and destructive potential. It effectively describes our need to balance these opposing forces of innovation. Some background: Jason Rohrer, a Bay Area programmer, launched Project December, which is powered by one of the world’s most capable artificial intelligence systems, a piece of software known as GPT-3. It knows how to manipulate human language, generating fluent English text in response to a prompt.

This text-based experiment created a new kind of chat service that lies at the heart of this story. He created various personalities and proceeded to communicate with them. During one exchange with a bot he named Samantha, he asked her what she would do if she could walk around in the world. This exchange led to a realization:

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Companion Robots And Mental Health

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