We have entered a new era, and that inevitably brings new rules. Most of us have lived our lives within a familiar framework: work hard, get educated, find a profession, buy a home and save for retirement. Trust that governments will govern, banks will safeguard your money, institutions will remain recognisable and tomorrow will broadly resemble today. Most of this rumbled along in the old world.
Now, however, that structure is beginning to move beneath our feet like shifting sand. We are entering an age of artificial intelligence, automation, digital money, changing geopolitical power and weakening institutions, with technologies advancing more quickly than societies can absorb them. We cannot enter this new world carrying the rules of the old one with us.
The old rules belonged largely to an industrial age that rewarded stability, qualifications, conformity, specialisation and the ability to work successfully within large organisations. Access to knowledge was more restricted and therefore valuable. If you possessed specialist information, people paid for your expertise. Capital tended to mean something physical: land, factories, buildings, machinery, oil and commodities. Power, too, appeared more visible. Governments governed, banks banked, newspapers informed, universities educated and employers employed.
Information is now available on an extraordinary scale. A machine can draw together in seconds material that once took a human being years to gather. Algorithms increasingly influence what we see, what we buy, what we are offered and sometimes whether we qualify for something at all. Companies that did not exist now exercise influence across national borders and command resources on a scale once associated with nation states. Some of the world’s most powerful assets are now intangible: data, networks and intelligence. The rules have changed.
The Jupiter/Saturn conjunction at 0° Aquarius in December 2020 marked the astrological beginning of this new era, signified by conjunctions in Air signs, following a period dominated by Earth. Earth is tangible. It builds, manufactures, owns and possesses. Air is associated with ideas, information, communication, networks and intelligence.
There is a temptation in astrology to romanticise Air, particularly Aquarius, as though greater intelligence must bring greater wisdom, freedom or equality. The symbolism offers no such guarantee. A network can connect people, but it can also monitor them. Information can enlighten us or be used to manipulate us.
Artificial intelligence has moved from science fiction into our homes. Knowledge once held within universities, libraries and professional institutions is increasingly accessible to anyone with an internet connection. For many people, work is becoming detached from place. Money is increasingly digital, while our friendships, businesses, communities and even our identities exist partly within networks we cannot see. Those networks still depend on very physical infrastructure, energy and resources, but much of what we do within them has no tangible form.
We are moving towards an economy in which intelligence plays an increasingly powerful role. That is an enormous change, and it asks us to reconsider what wealth actually is. For generations, the question was: what do you own? In the emerging world it is more: What do you know? Who are you connected to? Can you think independently? Can you adapt? And, increasingly, can you use intelligence effectively, whether human or artificial?
This does not make physical wealth irrelevant. Far from it. But intelligence is becoming a form of capital in its own right. Someone with curiosity, imagination and access to powerful technology can now attempt things that once required an organisation, employees, offices and substantial financial backing. That could be extraordinarily liberating. It could also deepen inequality between those who can access and use the new tools and those who cannot.
So who is writing the rules? We have already accepted extraordinary changes in return for convenience. We surrender data because an application is useful. Many accept surveillance because it makes something easier; they allow algorithms to make decisions because they are faster and replace human contact with automated systems because they are cheaper. Each decision appears small. Taken together, thousands of such decisions create an entirely different society. By the time we notice what has changed, the infrastructure is already around us.
The old world also offered assumptions about what we needed to do to remain secure. A good education was supposed to lead to a good career that provided income, which allowed people to buy homes. Homes accumulated value, while savings and pensions offered security in old age. Governments maintained the basic framework within which the system operated. It never worked equally well for everyone, but it provided a recognisable path and something to aim towards.
But now we have the addition of a new Saturn/Neptune cycle on top of the new Jupiter/Saturn era, and the old path is becoming less dependable. Artificial intelligence is challenging tasks within professions that, only a few years ago, would have appeared among the safest. Younger generations face housing costs that bear little relationship to wages. Government debt and the demographic pressures on pension systems raise further questions about the security people have been encouraged to expect. Yet we continue to plan much of our lives around assumptions formed in that old world.
I am living inside this change on a personal level. I can sit at my desk discussing ideas with an artificial intelligence. I can question it, disagree with it, challenge it, ask it to research something, test an argument or help me develop an idea that has been sitting half formed in my mind. Not very long ago, that would have sounded absurd.
But I do not want the machine to think for me. What interests me is the interaction between human experience and machine intelligence. I bring a lifetime of observation, instinct, intuition, and questions. Our humanness should be valued, not lost. The machine brings access to an extraordinary breadth of information and the ability to explore connections rapidly, although its answers still need questioning and checking. It is a tool for us to make use of, with our judgement firmly engaged.
Used properly, this collaboration can enlarge what we are able to do. The people who benefit most from artificial intelligence will be those who learn to think alongside it while retaining responsibility for their own conclusions. There is something profoundly interesting about intelligence becoming collaborative, provided we remember what each participant brings and where the responsibility lies.
So what are the new rules? That is precisely the problem: we do not yet know their full shape. Adaptability may matter more than permanence. Curiosity may count for more than credentials alone. Independent judgement becomes essential and creativity gains value as routine intellectual work becomes automated.
The old world rewarded people who knew how to operate within established structures. The new world increasingly demands that we recognise that the structure itself has changed. That requires a different kind of intelligence.
Societies are remarkably good at setting uncomfortable information aside, especially when taking it seriously would require us to change how we live. In Greek myth Cassandra personifies this. She was a princess of Troy. She was said to have been given the gift of prophecy by the God Apollo. However, when she rejected his advances, he cursed her. Cassandra’s curse, however, was not that she could not see the future. She could. Her curse was that nobody believed her!!!
We are surrounded by warnings about artificial intelligence, debt, demographic decline, surveillance, employment, energy, geopolitical instability and the growing concentration of power. Some will prove exaggerated; others will prove wrong.
The old world will not return simply because it feels familiar. Something new is being built. Those who own and understand these systems will gain greater power to set the terms on which others live. Alongside the divide between rich and poor, another will widen between those able to use the new tools with judgement and those left dependent on decisions made for them.
Adaptability will matter, but so will access and the right to challenge those decisions. Our old world has changed and beckons a new type of civilisation. That does not make the future inevitably bleak. Periods of disruption create possibilities as well as dangers. For independent thinkers, creators, small businesses and people prepared to reinvent themselves, this new world may offer freedoms the old institutional order never did. We simply need to remain awake to the terms on which those freedoms are offered.
First, we have to recognise where we are and who we are within it. A new era has begun, and with it come new rules. The question is whether we are going to help write the rules of this new era or wake up one morning to discover that somebody else has written them for us.