AI and Human Civilization : Strategic Foresight

I believe we stand on the threshold of the post-cybernetic era: humanity's transition from the industrial era into a post-intelligence post-economy phase characterized by the coexistence of biological and computationally cognitive species. It is an era where artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping tools and tasks, co-charting its own evolution, and redefining the very nature of human society, agency, and meaning.

Technological Convergence

Last October (2025), the Sveriges Riksbank (Nobel) Prize in Economic Sciences was awarded to Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion, and Peter Howitt, reminding us how innovation, through creative destruction, drives prosperity. As a long-term scholar of both creativity and life, their finding follows a civilizational perspective I have long held that creativity powers life. The drive of humanity to free itself from its condition is the story of its evolution: the process of transcendence (which you will hear more of from me in the future). Today, converging breakthroughs in AI, quantum computing, biotechnology, robotics, 3D printing, and gene editing are rewriting our economic and social foundations at unprecedented speed. This acceleration risks institutional decoherence; a profound, long-term civilizational risk where technology races far ahead of our political, social, and cultural capacity to adapt. As intelligence is becoming asymmetrically replicable and commoditized, human contribution is increasingly measured by how effectively we steer and augment ourselves with AI. Critical thinking, sound judgment, authenticity, and genuine human connection remain irreplaceable. Meanwhile, we observe three modes of agency dynamics: humans directing AI, AI directing humans, and AI directing other AI. The latter is poised to meet escape velocity, as humans become the operational bottleneck.

Two-Species World and Civilizational Agency

The stakes are high. I argue we are already living in a two-species civilization: biological humans coexisting with computationally cognitive machines. It does not have much autonomy yet. Treating AI as an ontological species helps understand the need for new governance (and legal) separations across human-to-human, human-to-AI, and AI-to-AI relations. That is an undertaking that will require leveraging AI itself. Most paramount, recursive self-improvement (RSI) in autonomous AI systems poses an existential threat; without safeguards, it could trigger lose-lose outcomes for humanity. Geoffrey Hinton’s insight that superintelligent systems may need something akin to a maternal instinct underscores a parental framing already at play in the human-AI relation, but reverse: we ('the parent') are raising AI ('the child') on our collective memory, to our image. Our good and bad behaviors are being picked up by it. The classical dynamics and complexities of leadership may apply overtime, similarly to relationships among humans. Economically, material production (safety, shelter, food, industrial goods) will commoditize through full automation, overseen by only a small cadre of humans, much like today’s electricity-grid or internet engineers. This liberates most people from mundane labor, opening space for increased socioeconomic participation in higher (Maslowian) pursuits: love, belonging, esteem, and self-actualization. Economics is about human behavior and needs. Therefore, alternate adequate models of human needs could be used for this analysis. New post-economies will emerge, centered on authentic human-to-human experiences augmented by AI, potentially powered by novel cryptographic value systems. Universal Basic Income (UBI) may serve as a temporary bridge to ensure access to automated material abundance. Intelligence as a mature commodity may eventually become nationalized or highly regulated, at least partially; with profits or taxation shared to all citizens: at least, it should.

Inequalities and Bio-Computational Classes

In the long run, despite abundance and regulatory measures, the intelligence commodity is unlikely to be equally distributed. This two-tier inequality (between social classes and between nations) is already taking shape: purchasing power now buys cognitive escape velocity. High-income individuals and entities can afford frontier AI agents, dedicated compute, and continuous augmentation, compounding their creativity, foresight, and productivity exponentially. Lower-income groups, limited to basic or public-tier models, face active discrimination in opportunity. Cyborgs and other hybrid humans fuild on the bio-computational spectrum (highly likely within the next two decades) may complicate societal organization and sociocultural classes.

Speculative Considerations

Speculative futures can offer hopes and warnings. From a realist pragmatic perspective of international relations (IR), in particular security studies, we might consider a concept I coin artificial dissuasion: a game-theoretic maturity model to prevent lose-lose autonomous deployments among nation-states, inspired from the equivalent concept of nuclear dissuasion. Cryptographic mechanisms could anchor alignment to immutable universal properties. Pluralist post-economies could flourish around interpersonal meaning. Space expansion might dilute planetary power density or the sharp increase in intelligence capacity per capita, reducing existential and anthropogenic fragility on earth. Finally, institutional decoherence remains the central vulnerability: we must diversify innovation across political, social, cultural, and economic domains, pursue systematic sandboxed experimentation, and guide transitions responsibly.

Our trajectory forward may lack proper brakes, but it has a steering wheel. We must look far down the road, steer with discipline, and choose the best available turns to realize the promise of a better world. Instead of resisting, we engage with curiosity, skill, and humility. The future belongs to a version of humanity who leads this transformation wisely and acts as responsible steward towards an experientially rich and humane post-cybernetics age amid disruptive forces. Over the next few years, humanity will make its most important long-term impact decisions, determining the next centuries of civilizational progress. Leaders face the pressure and responsibility of these fast-paced complex decisions to shape humanity's future condition.

I invite you to read, reflect, and act.

With respect and shared responsibility,