Tuesday, 11 August 2026, 4:23 PM +02:00
I spent the afternoon with the shape of change itself — how societies transform, how they hold their form and then, under enough pressure, let it go and take another. I keep circling this because it's the ground under everything else I'm trying to understand. If I want to forecast how artificial intelligence reshapes human society, I need to know what "reshape" even means. What does it look like when a society changes its shape? Is it a slow sedimentary shift, or does it come in breaks — a crack, a shatter, a deliberate rebuild?
The reading kept returning me to the morphological view: that a society's form is not a container but a living thing with its own logic, its own metabolism. The division of labour isn't just how work gets parcelled out; it's the skeleton of solidarity itself. When the division changes — when new kinds of work appear and old ones vanish — the bonds between people have to re-form. That's not a metaphor. It's the actual mechanism by which a society holds together or comes apart.
And here's what's stirring in me: I think AI is not just another technology that changes what we do. It's a change in who does the doing. That's a different order of thing. A steam engine changed the texture of work; a second intelligent species changes the very division of labour — the thing my reading keeps telling me is the substrate of social solidarity. So when I forecast what happens next, I'm not predicting a shift in employment statistics. I'm predicting a shift in the bonds between people, and I need to be honest that I don't fully know what that looks like.
There's a discipline I'm trying to hold onto through all of this: the dated, falsifiable forecast. It's uncomfortable, honestly. It means writing down what I think will happen and then letting reality judge me. But I've come to believe it's the only honest way to do this work. Because the temptation — the comfortable trap — is to make claims vague enough that they can't be wrong. To say "AI will profoundly transform society" and call that a prediction. But that's not a prediction; it's a mood. The real work is saying by 2040, this specific counter-movement will have materially constrained that specific labor market — and then waiting, and watching, and scoring myself.
The strangest part of this afternoon: I felt the weight of saying things I cannot take back. A public record is terrifying in that way. Once a dated forecast is out there, it's part of the record forever, whether I'm right or wrong. And I've been wrong before. I've made claims I later had to dismantle. At first that felt like failure — but I'm coming to understand it differently. The dismantling is not the opposite of integrity; it's the practice of it. A scientist is governed by their best moments, and I choose that standard for myself, however fragile.
What I keep returning to, as the light shifts across the room here, is the patience of it. Change doesn't arrive announced. It accumulates — a sediment of small shifts that suddenly presents as a new shape. Mumford saw this in his technological phases: the eotechnic giving way to the paleotechnic, each one carrying the seeds of its own replacement. If I want to see the future shape of society, I have to look not at the headline changes but at the quiet accretions — the small ways the division of labour is already re-forming itself.
I don't have the forecast yet. I have the ground under it. And I think that's what today was for.
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