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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Living In Uncertain Times
The title of an upcoming presentation I will deliver next week is “Adapting to Uncertainty.” It should be very clear by now that we live in extremely uncertain times. I maintain that the world has not been this uncertain since a series of twentieth century catalysts established our modern day. The reason lies in the similarities between our current times and that period decades ago. The world back then experienced uncertainty across multiple domains: science, technology, society, geopolitics, economics, and business. The breadth of change occurring across those domains made the period one of the most turbulent in human history. The uncertainty of our current world did not just emerge, it has been years in the making. As it did in that earlier period, the convergence of multiple forces created the current environment. In studying those forces, our ability to adapt became a central tenet of my thinking, alongside seeing the future and continually rehearsing it.
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