The future

When confronted with transformations that feel total, we reach for religious language almost by instinct. That is precisely what makes it powerful enough to motivate and dangerous enough to excuse almost anything done in its name.

Just as traditional theology explains why a good God permits suffering, Altman’s framing explains why a good company must risk the end of the world. Catastrophe becomes not a failure of judgment but the necessary potential price of the ultimate upgrade to the human condition.

When we removed the vertical axis, God and heaven as the destination of history, we did not flatten the world, but tilted the horizontal axis, progress and technology, until it reached a pitch of religious intensity. The fervour with which contemporary technologists argue about the fate of civilisation is not an accident of temperament but a... See more

For over a thousand years, medieval Christianity supplied a complete account of where history was going and how it would end. History began with creation, fell with sin, moved toward redemption, and would conclude with a final judgment. When that worldview collapsed, gradually across the Enlightenment and in the centuries that followed, the... See more

Because that’s the essential nature of a borderland: for all the disorientation, it’s also a frontier. It’s the space where the old rules break down and the new ones get written. It’s a moment of pure creation.

• Cognition refers to the role of intelligence as the primary input of production and social organisation.The one thing no machine could do was exercise general judgement: to reason flexibly, across domains, in the face of novelty. That boundary is now dissolving, and with it the assumption that human intelligence is the irreducible input of

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Change is the permanent condition of history but stability and stasis are not the same thing. A structure can absorb enormous disruption while its foundations remain intact. What is rare, and what we are now encountering, is when the foundations move.

We are building the most powerful tools we have ever had. Our temptation is a very American one: to engineer immediately. To ask of every new capability: What can I build with this? How do I deploy it? What can I do with it? How can I change creation with it? These are all necessary questions, but they are second questions. They are Genesis 2:15... See more

Webster, although he was a deeply religious man himself, reversed the order. He tended before he named. He decided what American English should be, and he built it. The result was efficient and clean and much faster. But this is what happens when you engineer before you discover. You get a useful product, but you lose the life and the weight of the... See more