Civilization as a sequence of coordination shocks
A coordination shock begins when technology makes a scarce capacity newly scalable before institutions can adapt. That capacity might be energy, food, memory, violence, information, capital, cognition, embodiment, or biology. Amplitude marks disruption magnitude. Click a tremor to open its era.
How civilization climbs by destabilizing itself
Breakthroughs move scarcity rather than abolish it. Read bottom to top: each rung makes one form cheap, then forces society to reorganize around the next bottleneck.
The Cognitive Industrial Revolution
AI is doing to symbolic labor what mechanization did to physical labor: it turns formerly skilled human outputs into scalable machine outputs.
The Industrial Revolution first mechanized working-class labor. The AI Revolution first destabilizes educated workers with credentials, institutional standing, and cultural influence.
Likely winners
Likely losers
Six futures branch from the present shock
Raw capability does not decide whether technology creates broad abundance or concentrated power. Ownership, institutions, energy, and legitimacy do. The fan traces six possible paths.
Optimism, calibrated by domain
AI lowers the cost of cognition. Healthcare, longevity, housing, and physical abundance still face constraints from biology, regulation, liability, energy, land, ownership, and institutions. The optimistic 2035+ story points in a plausible direction but compresses the timetable.
Every shock runs the same eight-step program
The loop appears in agriculture, writing, printing, industrialization, electricity, computing, the internet, and now AI. It ends with a new scarcity waiting for the next breakthrough.
The pattern spirals upward. Each turn ends higher on the scarcity ladder than it began.