Sunday thoughts: is our golden age ending? 🌍
A mandatory read if you want to understand our times.
Nothing to do with AI or Marketing. Yet, everything to do with all the rest.
It’s helped me put things into perspective… and realise how lucky I am to live right now, in Europe, in this moment of history.
Ours is a golden age,
no questions about it.
Comparable to Ancient Greece, the Roman Republic, or even Song China.
But cracks are starting to show.
Every golden age has three fundamental elements in common:
- Free and open society
- Rule of law
- Peace
That’s the foundation for individual inventiveness and innovation.
And it’s exactly social and technological innovation that sparks a golden age.
Ours, clearly, is driven by technology.
But there’s one more thing golden ages share.
They never last.
Today, open society, rule of law, and peace are being seriously tested.
Without them, our golden age won’t survive.
The trigger of decline is simple:Â fear.
When fear of decline outweighs belief in progress, decline becomes inevitable, like a self-fulfilling prophecy.
But look at how far we’ve come in just a few decades.
And how much more we can still achieve.
Decline isn’t imminent.
And it’s definitely not inevitable.
Take one example:
the golden ages of the past produced some of humanity’s greatest minds, philosophers, artists, statesmen etc.
Yet none of them, over thousands of years, ever questioned the role of women in public life or the existence of slavery.
Now think of today.
And we still have a long way to go!
At this point it’s on us.
To choose between fear of decline or faith in progress and peace.
And if we choose the latter we need to protect it at all cost!
So in a sense yes, this post is also about AI.
Because this technology might just be the spark of an even better golden age.
If we want it to be. ⚡
