Geopolitics is in flux, history has “returned”, there is war, political upheaval and technological disruption everywhere: These matters command an overwhelming share of global attention and public intellectual discourse. Yet the most important transformation for the collective destiny of mankind, the redefinition of the individual, is unfolding and deepening in relative quiet and with comparatively little debate.
We are not simply living through yet another Industrial Revolution – the fourth one, as technologists claim – or through just another great historical rearrangement of world order, as geopoliticians observe. However large their scope, these are true but not sufficient descriptions of our current moment.
It may well be that, as AI advocates insist, this new technology and the upending of whole economic sectors and modes of production that it entails, is a pattern that we have seen before with the invention of the steam engine and the introduction of machines in factory production. As for the convulsions in global affairs, again, a perfectly reasonable parallel may be drawn to previous turning points that reset the international system, from Westphalia 1648, to Vienna 1815, Versailles 1919 or Potsdam 1945. But it does not necessarily follow that we are now simply seeing another turn of the wheel, another verse added to history’s rhyme.
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