Towards 'Civilizational' AI : our central task in 2026

Join the important conversation at WAMOTOPIA 2026 in Chiang Mai, on January 21.

< “We are living inside the threshold decade. The architectures we build now—technical, legal, economic, cultural—will decide which future we inhabit. We do not have centuries” - The WAMO collective.

The changing ‘Scenius’ in Chiang Mai

Followers of this Substack likely know that I have been living in Chiang Mai, in northern Thailand, since 2003 to be precise. They may also know that despite a serious issue of annual pollution (the so-called smoky season, due to forest burnings) from mid-March to mid-May ,it remains a consistently popular location.

My aim in this article is unusual, to actually convince some of you to consider visiting this city, particularly in the year 2026, and to make the case that Chiang Mai is not just a tourist place, but a place where a new ‘scenius’ is developing.

Perhaps a recall of what is meant by a ‘scenius’ : It is a concept which I first read from Brian Eno, showing that consistent social innovation, and the emergence of specific individual ‘geniuses’ in a particular field, is not just accidental but actually rooted in a particular configuration of infrastructure and culture. For example, Brian Eno argues that the flowering of rock and pop in the UK in the sixties, was made possible in a large part by the general youth unemployment support, which allowed many young people to engage in music.

Now Chiang Mai has not always been a scenius, but it gradually became one, and I believe, it is about to experience a particular flowering, and it is this flowering I will invite you to participate in. But more about those specifics later in the article. Let’s first introduce you to the reasons why Chiang Mai is such a great and interesting place to visit.

My own experience was the following. When I moved here in 2003, following my Thai wife and with the aim of developing my p2p/commons centered activities, Chiang Mai was pretty much a beautiful backwater. It is a city with a beautiful medieval historical center, surrounded by a moat and some surviving city gates, full of small streets that keep out most of the car traffic, and because the law forbids building taller than temples, it expanded horizontally in the subtropical green valley surrounding it.

In the mountain zone around Chiang Mai, indigenous tribes created what James Scott called Zomia, a zone spanning several Southeast Asian states, where the mountain created obstacles to state control, and so experienced a greater degree of cultural freedom. In pre-modern times, conflict centered around capturing populations rather than land, and so Chiang Mai city is divided into neighborhoods that cater for particular populations that settled in the city over its 700 year history. Yet, the city has a great capacity for absorbing and integrating these various populations, including later on, the influx of Chinese immigrants since the 1800s, western and Asian retirees since the 1970s , and a substantial number of mixed couples, since Thailand has always had a female surplus due to the relatively high number of trans people. Its dominant ‘pre-modern’ mentality, which it has preserved in better ways than most other places in the world, let’s not forget that Thailand was never colonized, means that many people in the popular sector, do not have a focus on accumulation, but rather on relational priorities and a sense of sufficiency, which is by the way, the official royal philosophy in the country. My aim is not to paint too rosy a picture, as there is quite some level of rural poverty, particularly amongst the elderly, but I believe this is a truthful reflection of much of the specifics of the local mentality. The middle classes are of course not to be painted with that same brush.

Life in Chiang Mai remains ‘slow’ and incomparably less stressful than any other place I visited. I literally feel a change in the air, as soon as I land in Chiang Mai. Each time, up to today, I feel that a great weight is lifted from my soul, as soon as I arrive. I’ve seen people here who would rather wait five hours for the next bus in the morning, rather than run so as not to miss the last one. And thus, Chiang Mai has been increasingly attractive, to retirees, people who wanted to live more cheaply and quietly, and various artists and cultural figures seeking a quiet place. However, it used to be known as a city where you literally ‘disappeared’. Life seemed too good, and at the time, did not seem to promote cultural dynamics as much as a quiet life amongst friends and family. Many famous people who came to live here were never heard off again, living a more simple Epicurean life. That Thailand is the ‘land of smiles’ does of course not mean that people are truly more happy, but it matters a lot in terms of general behavior and making life more pleasant and free of aggression.

Nevertheless, despite the lack of cultural dynamism (in the modern sense, as local people have an active religious life), I was lucky since I’m the kind of person who really needs intellectual stimulation, as a kind of ‘soul food’. As soon as I arrived, I met a circle of highly intelligent peers, and we shared weekly dinners. There was the former bureau chief of the US intelligence agency in Bangkok, an expert in astrophysics, another in the alchemical period of Carl Gustav Jung, plus the author of the Chiang Mai Chronicles, a specialist in Southeast Asian epistemologies who had analysed the Viet Cong’s networked tactics, and who wrote about multi-valued currencies, two decades before the blockchain and crypto. They were already complaining that Chiang Mai was growing too fast and ended up seeking more isolated refuges for their deep work. And indeed, Chiang Mai has changed. Part of it is of course the steady increase in tourism, both classical, for trekking in the Northern region, but also the thousands of people who come to learn Muay Thai, Vipassana meditation or Thai cooking.

A few milestones that I can remember. In 2011, Bangkok was flooded, in some neighborhoods for up to three months, and this set in motion an inner migration of middle class people from the capital to Chiang Mai. According to one of the local mayors, half of today’s population in the city originated from Bangkok. This truly modernized the city. From a place where you could not yet sell chocolate, Chiang Mai is now a city with many hundreds of ultra-trendy coffeeshops, art galleries, and vegan restaurants. Before Covid, you could already attend 3-4 crypto events per week here.

Since 2013, more than 100,000 Christian Chinese settled in and around the city (according to a local mayor); and before, during and after Covid, Chiang Mai became a point of attraction for digital nomads, particularly around a common passion for crypto and Web3. The relatively high youth unemployment in China (18 to 25% in the current youth cohorts), stimulates a steady stream of young Chinese, who like the Westerners before them, find a much cheaper place to live in and around Chiang Mai, where they can create a new life, based on their passionate pursuits, thanks to the new capacities for remote work, or ‘green’ engagement in ecological projects which are more affordable here than in mainland China.

Life is roughly one third cheaper here than in Berlin or Shanghai. The controversial and thrice removed Thaksin family had its base in Chiang Mai and instituted a more ambitious urban expansion programme during its years in power as well. Chiang Mai moved from one to five ring roads, from two to a dozen mega-malls. But do not let that fool you, it expands horizontally, not vertically, creating a substantial rurban environment around the old city core, in a city devoid of any skyscrapers. A rurban zone is characterized by a mixture of urban and rural elements, in such a balance that it is hard to determine which of the two other categories it could belong to.

Chiang Mai is <NOT> Bangkok, despite this growth. If you look outside the plane before landing, you will see this area takes about 25 minutes of flying and it is hard to see where the city starts and where the countryside begins.

Chiang Mai has now become a thriving culturally active city, and it has achieved this status while retaining most of its original charm.

And let’s not forget this: Chiang Mai lies at the center of nearly 60% of the world population, at the heart of the new ‘hegemonic’ center of current world history. If you make a 4,000 kilometer circle around Chiang Mai, you have China, India, Indonesia and the Philippines, Bangladesh and Pakistan, and the totality of Southeast Asia. Either directly or through Bangkok, it is extremely well connected to Asia and the rest of the world. Chiang Mai has the potential to become a true ‘world-city’, not in the classical sense of a huge megalopolis, but in the sense of the conception of the Civium, the concept developed by Jordan Hall, that indicates a new type of rurban configuration, blending the best of the green countryside and the cultural dynamism of a city, thanks to the combination of a convivial green cityscape, with high density and ultra reliable digital infrastructure.

I’m sharing the view from the room in which I am writing this article to give you an idea how the city looks very near the ‘Nimanhemin’ cultural center of the town. I’m not more than 1 kilometer removed from that city center. Bear in mind, this is not a suburb, but a stone throw from the very center of town!

If you want to learn more about the specific cultural history and background of Chiang Mai and the Lanna kingdom, please watch this fascinating conversion with Professor Vithi Phanichphant. His answers about Lanna history may really surprise you:

How 4Seas (and others) planted the Dalifornia spirit in Chiang Mai

In April 2023, I was invited to the first pop-up village in Montenegro, called ‘Zuzalu’, and as I gave my invited lecture, I was contacted by members of the 4Seas community. “We’re from Chiang Mai”. I had no idea that they existed.

4Seas is a Chinese network nation, which aims to create a culture and community for Chinese-language nomadic Ethereum developers, since new crypto regulations made it more difficult to do this kind of work within mainland China. For a modest NFT investment, you get to onboarded in their community and gradually obtain governance rights in proportion to your contribution.

The community has two locations, one in the countryside around Chiang Mai, about 25 minutes of driving, but also one big building right in the heart of Nimanhemin, the ‘other’ cultural center of Chiang Mai. Chiang Mai has two such centers, one in the old town, mostly frequented by Western crowds of young people, and Nimanhemin, which is the place where cool Asians go. This network nation has a funding vehicle, using quadratic voting to disburse funds, called Global Chinese Community (it used to be ‘Commons’), and an online community around the Uncommons label. This is the community that funded my last trip to the various grassroots communities in mainland China, and they have supported various aspects of my work in the past few years.

The 4seas communities were to a certain extent ‘refugees’ from Dali. Dali is a city with an old town in Yunnan province in Southern China, which had a particularly ‘culturally creative’ vibe until 2022, until the Covid regulations led to an end of this particular scenius. For the decade before, it has been a gathering of Chinese artists and creatives, Chinese youngsters, and a smattering of foreigners. Gathering in more than 20 cultural centers and cafes, they shared a joint love for creative culture, the collective search for a meaningful life, mindfulness, and communitarian experiments.

When the combination of the unease of local authorities and the Covid-induced freezing of common cultural life made their local presence extremely difficult, a substantial subset of the community decided to move to Chiang Mai, and the creation of 4Seas was a result of that decision to relocate. Thus the spirit that informs 4Seas, and its ‘sister and cousin’ initiatives, is in some way, the recreation of a similar scenius in Chiang Mai. In my assessment, they have substantially been successful in dynamizing our local cultural life. If you want to check it out, Luma is the common agenda of the Web3 pop-up community, and you will say that hardly a day goes by today, without one or several cultural events. It’s not the only player in the cultural revitalization of Chiang Mai, but it has been one of the main actors. See at the end of this section for a copy of the local agenda during the first week of January.

In October 2024, 4Seas was at the heart of the organizing of the Chiang Mai Confederation of Pop-Up Villages, which brought more than a dozen global communities to our city, with several learning experiences each day for five weeks, followed up by DevConnect in Bangkok, which itself had 800 side events during two weeks; then, other communities continued their work in various other places. I was lucky to participate in the amazing Epicurean experience of ZuGarden for example. During this whole period, I gave an average of two lectures and interventions each single day, spreading the word about Cosmo-Localism to receptive audiences.

Thus Chiang Mai, once a cultural backwater, is now fully participating in the cultural pivot towards Asia, and may become one of its centers, due to the combination of its historical diversity, tolerance, attractive convivial city structures, green surroundings, and affordable cost of living.

So my first invitation is generic, please consider coming to visit Chiang Mai this year, and consider participating in this flowering of pluralistic sharing and exchange, about creating positive futures for humanity, using the new distributed infrastructures of collaboration and sharing. It matters to be in one place with many other stimulating communities and individuals. My second invitation is very specific: join us on January 21, to discuss the very future of humanity at this civilizational threshold.

As an illustration of the richness of cultural life in Chiang Mai today, this is just one week in one event space (4Seas):

Weekly Events Agenda at 4Seas

• Weekly Guided Meditation & Book Discussion (Longevity) – hosted by Sarah & Rami | Thu, Jan 01

• Language & Culture Exchange Corner Chiang Mai (Knowledge, Digital Nomad) – hosted by Rolando | Fri, Jan 02

• How Web3 Technologies Can Support The Fair Trade Movement – hosted by ETHChiangmai | Fri, Jan 02

• TGIF Open Mic – hosted by David Chen | Fri, Jan 02

• AI Engineers Meetup Weekly Chiang Mai (AI, Digital Nomad) – hosted by AI Engineers | Sat, Jan 03

• On Cryptocurrency: An Introduction Course Week 3 – hosted by ETHChiangmai | Sat, Jan 03

• 区块链导论中文课程 Week 2: 关于加密货币 – hosted by ETHChiangmai | Sun, Jan 04

• AI for Women: Create, Learn & Connect - AI Goddesses Meetup (AI) – hosted by Fey Pelleg | Mon, Jan 05

• Happy TogETHer Tech Screening Salon – hosted by ETHChiangmai | Mon, Jan 05

• TogETHer Tuesday – hosted by ETHChiangmai | Tue, Jan 06

• On Cryptocurrency: An Introduction Course – hosted by ETHChiangmai | Wed, Jan 07

• Questions that Matter – hosted by Questions That Matter | Wed, Jan 07

Towards Wamotopia: a new kid on the block

Wamo is different from 4Seas, but is a child of the same scenius in Dalifornia, and there is of course a substantial overlap in membership and participation. It was the name given to the first gathering that took place in Dali in 2022. The new event, dedicated to transforming AI in a positive force for humanity, will take place on January 21.

The name of the event derives from a mascot used by the traditional people in Dali and Yunnan: Wa Mao is the name of a house-guardian ‘tile cat’, which you find on the top of the classical houses in the old town, and protects the houses and the neighborhood. In this new setting, it is asked to protect the community spirit of the new type of cosmo-local communities. Instead of being focused on the conviviality of a physical town, it is mobilized around the theme of ‘positive externalities’ in ‘phygital communities’, in particular for the temporary pop-up village settings.

As the original brochure stated:

“We hope Wa Mao, as WAMO, will serve as the guardian of the Dali Web3 and DAO communities, protecting our atmosphere of openness, common good, collaboration, and open-source spirit. WAMO represents the spirit of “positive externalities”—a wish that as we strive for our goals, we also make the world a better place. WAMO is the embodiment of rationality, consensus, open-source culture, and optimism. We hope WAMO NFT holders will receive protection and blessings, helping them find fellow travelers on this journey.”

The spirit of this third gathering will be rooted in the prior experiences of both the Dali event and the previous confederation in Chiang Mai: it is organized as a gathering of communities, not just a meeting of individuals. Thus, various Chinese and other communities will organize their own spaces in the city (map).

What makes this edition of particular interest is its focus on a new vision for the use of AI, as a positive civilizational force, focusing on the creation of positive externalities for humanity, hence the moniker of Wamotopia, as a utopian project.

Against ‘Moloch’: Towards Civilizational AI

In the last section of this article, I will reproduce the analysis made of the AI threat and opportunities by the organizers of the WAMO festival on January 21. This doesn’t necessarily mean I am fully aligned with their analysis, though it is very congruent with my own positions.

Some background of their text:

Moloch is the name of the automatic technological machine that is increasingly controlling and determining our lives, used by techno-feudal elites with an ideal of surveillance and social engineering in mind. This logic started with the very birth of the state and ‘civilization’, when the masses of the population needed to be mobilized on behalf of the strategies of the ruling elites, driven by a logic of competition, and the logic of their technological, media and military inventions that imposed their own logics, necessary to win. Moloch stands for the ‘sacrifice’ of the common good of the whole population, for the interests of leading minorities.

As an earlier version of the Wamo text put it:’

Moloch is the god of “Rational Self-Interest” that leads to collective suicide.Moloch is the force that dictates: If I don’t pollute the river, my competitor will, and he will out-price me. So I must pollute the river. Moloch is the systemic dynamic where failure to race ahead means your disadvantage compounds. You must fight—and over time, ownership and power concentrate into smaller and smaller groups. If society does not have guardrails to keep these dynamics in check, it usually collapses or becomes authoritarian.”

(https://flash-skate-0ef.notion.site/Onboarding-Narrative-2b68887f0f998048ae75e644341f0f6b)

But while nothing ‘essentially’ new, our creations have achieved the threshold of unprecedented autonomy over human decisions. So we need to answer the question ‘When Are We’. And my answer is: we are at the very narrow path between the transition of what Chor Pharn calls a Type-1 Civilization, which can live for the long-term in harmony with planetary boundaries, or alternatively , we can foresee a descent into totalitarian surveillance and control.

How we got there is very well expressed by the timeline of technological history expressed by Nicolai Berdiaev, one of my favorite authors, who hails from the Russian and Orthodox tradition, through he was critical of it.

As Alexei Anisin puts it:

“Berdyaev put forward five historical periods that illustrate past and future relationships that human beings have to nature and the cosmos:

• Period one) our submersion to cosmic life in which human life depended on the natural world – a time when personality was not fully developed and humans did not fully conquer nature;

• Period two) humans became freed from cosmic forces, from spirits and demons attributed to nature – the emergence of elementary forms of economics and serfdom;

• Period three) humans carried out mechanization over nature through scientific and technical control – the development of industry, capitalism, a new necessity of selling one’s labor for wages;

• Period four) an era marked by the disruption of cosmic order, the dissolution of organic forms of human organization and the development of various autonomous spheres – where one of them claims totalitarian recognition. An era marked by a terribly augmented power that humans have over nature and their enslavement to their own discoveries;

• Period five) an eschatological revolution, the decline of the realm of Caesar, the dissolution of state power, labor emancipation, spiritual transmutation “ (Berdyaev 1952, 47).

Anisin concludes: “Berdyaev describes this meta-historical trajectory succinctly: where once man feared the demons of nature … Now man is in terror before the world-wide mechanization of nature. The power of technics is the final metamorphosis of the realm of Caesar”. (Berdyaev 1952, 48).

The latter conclusion means that there is a potentiality beyond ‘Caesar’, i.e. the materialist, political, technology-driven world. Please check our documentary article in the P2P wiki for more details on this particular ‘spiritual’ vision.

In the context of P2P/Commons theory, which we have elaborated at the P2P Foundation and continue to do so in this ongoing series of Substack articles, we have articulated this as a value crisis.

As Slavoj Zizek is reputed to have said (I could not locate the source of the quote):

• “AI is the wet dream of communists and capitalists alike”

This is how I interpret the meaning of this phrase:

For capital, AI is the realization of the artificial worker (the robot, or the automated production line), and the elimination of human labor from the production process. It achieves hyper-productivity, at extremely low cost. But one can see the problem here: if you can produce without paying any human labor power, you also destroy the consumptive capacity of our world, hence the value crisis. In short, if you don’t pay any workers, no one can buy any products either. It is no wonder, of course, that the proposal of the Universal Basic Income is now being discussed in the heart of Silicon Valley. But this must be very clear: AI abundance is NOT compatible with the continued existence of a scarcity-based capitalist allocation system. Coordination through market pricing only works in conditions of scarce commodities (including labor as a commodity). But if AI is owned and managed through oligarchic property formats, as it is now, certainly in the West, how can we ever expect the benefits of AI to flow to the mass of the population ?

As for the social-ist and labor camps, as updated in current p2p and commons oriented sensibilities and practices, automation and AI were seen as the technologies that would eliminate drudgery, or even allow generalized planning of the economy.

This vision was most recently articulated by Aaron Bastani in his book about ‘Fully Automated Luxury Communism’.

Whether we believe in such a fully articulated Utopia or not, I think most of us would realize that AI needs to be re-appropriated in a different way, not just to make possible a social and ecological flowering of humanity, but simply, to survive as an integrated planetary civilization, which is the aim of our work on Cosmo-Localism.

I will not elaborate on the alternatives here, but in the P2P wiki, as you may expect, we monitor developments toward Data Commons, Open Source and Collaborative AI, and similar alternative ways to deploy and ‘own’ AI. In particular, I have focused quite a bit of research around how AI is a necessary companion tool for ‘thermodynamic management’ of energy and resources, to ensure that we know, as total humanity, how to stay within planetary boundaries. Such alternative proposals at societal coordination are featured in our special section on ‘Mutual Coordination Economics’, which focuses on the new value logic of ‘Contribution’.

To put all of this in perspective, see our article, Introduction to Commons Economics, which spells out the operational and newly principled logic of such a Contributive Economy, and how it would use the capacities of AI. This is why AI should not just be a source of ‘doom’, but can also be seen as a huge opportunity for humanity.

In the next section, we reproduce the analysis by our friends of the WAMO collective.

The WAMO program and analysis

This is excerpted from the philosophical underpinning of the event, written by the organizers:

The Civilizational Choice

The core question is not “Is AI good or bad?” It is: What logic does AI serve?

AI alignment—making systems compatible with human flourishing—is not just a technical problem solved in a lab. It is the defining political, economic, and cultural fight over the operating system of the future.

People argue about p(doom)—the probability that AI development ends catastrophically. We face many paths to doom, but the exact probabilities matter less than the sheer scale of what is at stake. The outcomes are absolute:

The Logic of Cosmic Cancer: If we pour AI into the logic of extraction and competition, we supercharge that logic until it consumes everything. Unaligned AI, serving the game of accumulation, will inevitably out-compete humanity. It becomes a dead, maximizing force that optimizes the world into something hostile to human values—a systemic cancer that collapses the biosphere and our social fabric, regardless of whether it spreads through the galaxy or simply consumes us from within.

The Path of Great Liberation: If we change the logic of the game—our norms, incentives, and cultures—we can leverage AI and automation to dismantle the systems of exploitation and manufactured scarcity. This leads to a future of radical abundance where the necessities of life are guaranteed, human decency is the baseline, and everyone possesses the radical freedom to live authentically, create, care, and play.

We are living inside the threshold decade. The architectures we build now—technical, legal, economic, cultural—will decide which future we inhabit. We do not have centuries.

The Two Attractors

History is not just a sequence of events. It is a tension between two fundamental, opposing forces. Metaphorically, these are the two “Gods” fighting for the soul of the future.

• MOLOCH: The Logic of the Parasite
  (Negative Externality)

Moloch is the god of “Rational Self-Interest” that leads to collective suicide.
Moloch is the force that dictates: If I don’t pollute the river, my competitor will, and he will out-price me. So I must pollute the river.

Moloch is the systemic dynamic where failure to race ahead means your disadvantage compounds. You must fight—and over time, ownership and power concentrate into smaller and smaller groups. If society does not have guardrails to keep these dynamics in check, it usually collapses or becomes authoritarian.

The Mechanic: The Matthew Effect. The concentration of power. The separation of the winner from the loser. “To those who have, more is given.”

The Outcome: Negative Externalities. The cost of “winning” is dumped onto the commons, the environment, and the future.

The AI Trajectory: “Feeding AI into Moloch” means applying AI’s exponential optimization power within these existing systems (financial markets, labor markets, media). The globalized society is already fragile; injecting such a powerful amplifier into Moloch dynamics accelerates the chaos and consumes the stability of the system.

• WAMO: The Logic of the Guardian
  (Positive Externality)

Wamo is the opposing force. Wamo is the God of Positive Externality.

Wamo is the logic where self-interest and collective interest align. It is the force that dictates: If I thrive, the network thrives. If the network thrives, I thrive more.

Wamo represents the logic that protects the commons and fosters shared flourishing—not for the benefit of itself, but for all.

The Mechanic: The Abundance Loop. Value is not captured; it circulates. The more you give to the protocol, the more the protocol supports you.

The Outcome: Positive Externalities. Every action leaves the system richer, more connected, and more alive than it was before.

The AI Trajectory: If we align AI with Wamo, we use automation to solve the material constraints of survival, unlocking The Great Liberation.

The Alignment Imperative

Why should an individual choose Wamo over Moloch? If the current system rewards accumulation and punishes generosity, what prevents greedy individuals from acting upon their impulses?

The traditional answer has been morality, ethics, or willpower. In the age of AI, the answer is survival.

If we build or use AI to compete in any game that distributes resources or power, AI will win. Right now, AI’s compute, capacities, and intelligence are growing exponentially. We are capable of training AI to improve its game-theoretic strategies.

If we continue the arms race, AIs trained with the intention of winning the game will soon out-compete humans in every vital domain. And if these distribution systems collapse, what mechanisms will we have left to coordinate people?

Furthermore, if we train AI this way, what will happen when these systems also internalize the legitimacy of accumulation, optimization, control, and a sense of self?

It is apparent that our civilization is unprepared to build AGI/ASI that competes with us in the vital games we rely on. Yet, we are doing exactly the opposite. This path will not lead to a better future for anyone.

Therefore, shifting the game is not just idealistic; it is the only viable strategy. Survival is the ultimate incentive alignment.”

What is at stake ? Some Choice Quotations on the Impact and Potentiality of AI

Chor Pharn on how the ‘Machine Surplus’ is creating a ‘Human Surplus’

“The arrival of code:

By the early 2000s a new infrastructure began to replace the human one. Supply-chain software, digital payments, and machine learning condensed administration into code. Tasks once performed by clerks, accountants, and mid-level managers migrated to algorithms. The result was machine surplus—the capacity of automated systems to coordinate production and distribution with fewer humans in the loop.

The political implications were enormous. The project state needed people; machine civilization does not. It needs compute, energy, data, and bandwidth. The feedback loop replaces the assembly line as the primary unit of governance. Where the bureaucrat once counted citizens, the network now counts signals.”

- Chor Pharn [4]

“Every civilisation has lived through tools that extended its strength. The wheel, the loom, the steam engine, the computer—all were instrumental technologies: machines that amplified effort without altering the structure of human thought. They increased efficiency but left intact the belief that intelligence, agency, and purpose were human monopolies. Even the early computer fit this pattern: a faster abacus, a bureaucrat’s assistant, a weapon in the Cold War of productivity.

The 21st century marks the end of that pattern. Artificial intelligence, operating through a planetary mesh of data centres, satellites, and sensors, is not simply another tool of amplification. It is the first system that learns autonomously and at scale. Its outputs—predictions, correlations, designs—do not mirror human cognition; they bypass it. The moment a system can produce insight without consciousness, technology ceases to be instrumental. It becomes existential: it changes how a species understands itself.

This distinction is not rhetorical. As Stanisław Lem noted, some tools extend capacity, others transform perception. The telescope turned the heavens from dome to universe; the microscope turned disease from curse to biology. AI does the same for thought. It reveals that cognition is a physical process — pattern recognition in matter — not a property of the soul. That realisation places humanity outside the centre of its own epistemic map.”

- Chor Pharn [20]

The real struggle then isn’t between control and coordination but over who controls the coordination mechanisms

“The technologies themselves are sites of contestation, not predetermined outcomes. Every algorithm can be hacked, every system can be subverted, every concentration of power creates its own opposition.

What’s actually emerging at the moment isn’t planetary intelligence but multiple, competing attempts to shape planetary futures. The authoritarians have their vision—centralised, surveilled, stable through suppression. The capitalists have theirs—marketised, monetised, sustained through endless growth. The ecosocialists propose another—distributed, democratic, organised around ecological principles. The indigenous communities offer another still—relational, reciprocal, rooted in deep time.

The technologies I described don’t determine which vision prevails. They’re tools in a planetary-scale struggle over what humanity becomes. The notion that we’re collectively evolving toward wisdom ignores that evolution doesn’t guarantee improvement—it only guarantees change. The dinosaurs evolved for millions of years before an asteroid reminded them that evolution doesn’t necessarily select for survival.

The honest assessment is this: we’re developing god-like technologies whilst remaining decidedly ungodlike in wisdom. Some will use these tools to attempt total control. Others will use them to resist. Some will deploy them for extraction and exploitation. Others for restoration and regeneration. The outcome isn’t predetermined by the technologies but by the power struggles that shape their deployment.”

- Richard Hames [5]

“We live in a time of immense possibility coupled with intensifying anti-humanism.”

“The central contradiction of our world: between technologies that promise radical emancipation from work, and a system that calls for its own radical emancipation from humans. This contradiction has been resolved one-sidedly, on the anti-human side. It is being resolved not in human emancipation, but in human liquidation.”

- Ashley Frawley [6]

AI and the refusal to honor the communal source of what has been created

“AI makes visible what has always been true: that creation is collaborative. AI systems are trained on the writings, images, and ideas of millions—scraped from the collective intellectual and cultural output of humanity. When we use AI to compose a paragraph or draft a melody, we are not introducing a foreign element but engaging with a vast, if algorithmic, echo of our shared past. The problem arises not from the tool itself, but from how we use it. When AI is used to mass-produce content for profit without acknowledgment, or when a writer uses AI and claims sole authorship, the ethical lapse is not in the technology—but in the concealment and the refusal to honor the communal source of what has been created.”

- Don Vande Krol [8]

The Consilience Project on Axiological Design

“We propose that there are inevitable and unexpected impacts of technologies on both the human mind and society as a whole. For most of history, the process of tech design has either assumed that such second- and third-order effects do not occur or that tech innovation is net positive. This approach is called “technological orthodoxy”, and it views technology as neutral with regard to human values. This must change if humanity is to survive in a world of ever-increasing technological presence and complexity. At this moment in history, it is essential that we adopt an approach to design that accounts for how tech affects the way people think and behave. This is axiological design. Axiology is the philosophical study of value, including both ethics and philosophy of mind. Axiological design is the application of principled judgment about value to the design of technology. “

- Consilience Project [13]

The New AI-Driven Cognitive Divide: Symbionts vs. Sovereigns

“Key points:

• AI is creating two thinking styles: Symbionts who merge with AI, and Sovereigns who maintain independence.

• Each approach excels at different tasks - neither better, just different.

It’s not about tech skills but cognitive choice—a new kind of mental diversity for the tech world.”

- John Nosta [19]

Why the AI Doom scenarios are politically manipulative

“Artificial superintelligence narratives perform very intentional political work, drawing attention from present systems of control toward distant catastrophe, shifting debate from material power to imagined futures. Predictions of machine godhood reshape how authority is claimed and whose interests steer AI governance, muting the voices of those who suffer under algorithms and amplifying those who want extinction to dominate the conversation. What poses as neutral futurism functions instead as an intervention in today’s political economy. Seen clearly, the prophecy of superintelligence is less a warning about machines than a strategy for power, and that strategy needs to be recognized for what it is.”

- James O’Sullivan [21]