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.
On the contrary: There is now an increasingly strong case that we’re stepping into an entirely new epoch and development stage of man, perhaps the first genuinely new branching away from the linear trunk of recorded human history. The wheel is not simply turning, it is a different wheel altogether; and the rhyme of history is turning perhaps into prose – or music.
The evidence is all around, but perhaps its meaning escapes us because we still interpret it through our old, familiar lenses. Consider the most trivial example of our times, that of internet content – especially by many anonymous posters. Aside from the copious amounts of “slop”, click-bait and “rage”, online feeds also offer mountains of exceptional photography and all manner of other art, commentary and analysis, funny “takes” and memes, and useful guides, tutorials and so on. Never before in history has so much talent and ingenuity been generated and displayed by so many people with so few resources.
On one level this serves to show just how much talent and value there is in society, among random individuals who even ten or fifteen years ago would have remained entirely unknown; many of them would not have even become aware of their abilities in absence of the digital experimentation field and tools available online.
It is thus common, today, to find exceptionally well-informed accounts online, on almost any subject, which far more deserve the title of “expert” than the vast majority of the so-called “real” (or, rather, credentialed) experts in those fields who offer their opinion in the media or find themselves on the speaking or policy circuit where they are listened to by often equally clueless “officials” and “decision-makers”.
This large-scale surfacing of talent into the new digital public square is not merely an interesting quirk of our online age. It is a time-bomb under an entire set of social assumptions and concepts that have been foundational to organised human society since pretty much forever – such as the idea of elites, expertise, authority and so on.
The great liberation of individual ability, in ways unfathomable to previous generations, is powered by a whole new set of crypto/AI-age instruments that are now only a click and a few dollars/month away. Individuals now have increasingly powerful tools to create and make money – the “creator economy” is but one early instantiation of this, the crypto-currency world is another – and to communicate and engage in un-intermediated, peer-to-peer exchanges directly with other individuals across the world.
This is already taking us far beyond anything we have known in terms of the potential for individual autonomy. It is true that many people are not inclined to avail themselves of these tools, or even to live a “digital life”; but the point is that they have the possibility to do so. In other words, the conditions are now well in place for the rise of the “sovereign individual” whose relationship to the world around him – even with reality itself, as much of his time is spent in virtual worlds – is set to become subject to his own terms and to become increasingly customised at that individual level, for the first time in history.
The limits of this positive picture must also be acknowledged, as there is a darker underside of increasing State control to this story, as described in these pages previously. But we are only at the start of this new age and there may be ways to address the risks to individual freedoms even while the world continues down the path of individual “sovereignty”.
Separately from these individual-level effects, but co-evolving with them, is the wider, and unprecedented, life-bending power of the frontier technologies of our times. Bioengineering and AI-driven generative biology (synthetic biology, overall), for example, have crossed into the realm of true “programming” of life. We are well past simply editing genes and tweaking existing organisms; now scientists – and increasingly in the future, corporations – are designing and creating functional new genetic code, proteins, and even simple life forms – like a new “therapeutic” virus created last year – that never existed in nature.
On the AI front more specifically, it is widely expected that Artificial General Intelligence, that would match the best human mind, is only a few years away; to be quickly followed, at that point, by Artificial Super Intelligence which will far surpass human ability and comprehension.
The final break with the purely “human” history of our species up to this point is now on course to be effected by advances in the field of human-machine interaction, and more specifically, brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). The latest clinical trial news from Neuralink shows participants able to control computer cursors and robotic arms all by thought, and to have their thoughts translated into spoken words at a speed of 40 words per minute. A small group of humans are therefore already part-cyborg, and in the near future it is expected that BCIs will begin to enable direct brain-to-AI chat, memory augmentation, and even restoring sight by feeding visual data straight into the visual cortex.
What lies at the intersection of this Triad of mind-boggling technological vectors – synthetic biology, AI itself, and BCI – is nothing less than a new Genesis-type moment that is certain to eventually redefine not just the meaning of “humanity” but that of existence itself. This is what I mean by the fact that we’re now branching off from the millennial course of human civilisation, with its historical patterns that we have seen recurring in various form for thousands of years.
There has been comparatively little serious, society-wide debate and political-level engagement with the moral, ethical and philosophical questions thrown up by these developments. Some thinkers, like Ray Kurzweil with his Singularity theory, have laid some of the groundwork. But the public task is monumental, and change is occurring at very high speed; there is little hope for achieving any consensus on how to “handle” these transformations at the level of societies and national polities or governments. Policy will doubtless lag behind practical innovation and implementation.
Considered in conjunction with the point made in the first part of this article – about the structural trend towards a form of individual-level sovereignty (or autonomy) in a societal context – the prospective redefinition of individuality at the human level must now raise fundamental questions about the very principles upon which State and Society are organised in our time.
The incongruity between our traditional/present World Model – from political arrangements to cultural and philosophical frameworks – and the completely unprecedented circumstances that await us in the near future, not just as nations but as a species, is immense. Against the backdrop of these great transformations described above, which are already underway, our public debate continues to be conducted largely in terms and with concepts that are centuries-old and which frame State “superstructures” that, in their modern incarnation, date from at least the 19th century if not before.
The public discourse and the questions that consume most public policy attention in 2026 are not too different from those of twenty, thirty, or in many cases even seventy or more years ago. The political battle rages over pensions, deficits, defence funding, and the like. In absence of even an awareness of the bigger challenges on the horizon, this business-as-usual is understandable; after all, these are real themes and concerns – in our present model of the world.
But the model is and was breaking down even on its own terms, even before the great technological surge of the past decade had become apparent. It has long been observed that the pension system in much of the West is unsustainable given our demographics, or that the demands of public spending for things like welfare and health are a near-insoluble problem without growth – so debt keeps rising. And recently we’ve begun to understand that the rapidly-multiplying threats to national security, in all domains, at all levels, are also effectively without known remedy as no realistic level of defence spending can cover all risks even moderately well.
This approach – the traditional approach – at such a time of radical change as the one we live in, an approach conducted in the same old terms, seeking to patch up a model of state and economic affairs designed in a different age, appears increasingly to be a fool’s errand. We are chasing ghosts – the ghosts of “policy solutions” for a world that we knew, but which doesn’t work like that anymore.
Completely new thinking is required. Radical thinking that goes beyond ideas about “simply” rearranging or reforming the state, including its constitutional arrangements – hard as even that may be. But yet even more boldness is required to match the vast and profound challenges – societal as well as human challenges – that are actually facing us, and that we are still, collectively, in broad ignorance of.
The best place to start, perhaps, is with the individual and his “sovereign” transformation that is already de facto underway. Political and philosophical work is required to understand how – or indeed whether – this process can shape wider changes in how we govern ourselves and the new rules and rights we might want to put in place in order to deal with what is coming in technology as well as societally. Truly novel thinking on first principles is hard and rare, but the present generation must rise to the task.
Is populism a distraction from a more important fight?