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Across disciplines and decades, a curious convergence is emerging. Scholars who do not share institutions, methods, or even metaphysical commitments are nevertheless circling around a similar intuition: we are entering a civilizational transition so deep that existing categories strain to contain it. The terminology differs — Conscious Technology Age, Dream Society, Age of Global Consciousness, Second Settlement Age — but the gravitational center feels shared.
Consider the arc of Jerome C. Glenn’s work. From Future Mind (1989) to Work/Technology 2050 and most recently Global Governance of the Transition to Artificial General Intelligence, Glenn frames the coming era as one in which intelligence — biological and artificial — becomes the central structuring force of civilization. Technology is no longer merely instrumental; it becomes cognitive infrastructure. Governance itself must evolve to manage this transition. The implication is not just smarter machines, but a reorganization of planetary coordination.
In a different register, Jim Dator speaks of a “Dream Society.” Here the axis of transformation is narrative, identity, and symbolic meaning. In Living Make-Belief and Beyond Identities, Dator suggests that we are moving into worlds where social reality is increasingly designed, performed, and iterated. The future is not simply built; it is imagined into being. If Glenn emphasizes intelligence systems, Dator emphasizes mythic systems — yet both point to a restructuring of how reality is constructed and governed.
Then there is William E. Halal, who describes an “Age of Global Consciousness.” For Halal, digital networks are not merely communication tools but scaffolding for global awareness. The digital revolution, in this reading, gradually integrates markets, governance, culture, and cognition into a more reflexive global whole. What emerges is not utopia, but a higher-order coordination capacity — a civilization increasingly aware of itself as a single system.
A fourth framing by Victor V. Motti in Planetary Foresight and Ethics — the “Second Settlement Age” — shifts attention from awareness to structuring. If the first settlement age organized humanity into agricultural, then industrial, then nation-state systems, the second settlement suggests planetary-scale institutional redesign. It asks: how do we ethically and strategically inhabit a fully interconnected Earth? How do foresight and governance evolve when our actions operate at planetary consequence?
At first glance, these frameworks seem distinct. One centers artificial intelligence. Another foregrounds narrative imagination. A third highlights networked consciousness. A fourth emphasizes foresight and ethics. Yet when triangulated, they reveal a shared structural intuition:
Intelligence is scaling beyond individual humans.
Networks are binding humanity into tighter planetary interdependence.
Identity and narrative are becoming more fluid and constructed.
Governance must evolve to manage unprecedented systemic complexity.
This convergence raises a deeper question. Are these thinkers independently detecting the same civilizational signal? Or are they participating in a shared intellectual climate shaped by digital modernity? Is this genuine structural transition — or the rhetoric of late-networked society interpreting itself?
The answer may lie in the nature of the future itself — Zukunft — which contains within it both Wiederkunft (again-coming) and Ankunft (arrival). Every epochal shift carries elements of recurrence and novelty. Empires have risen and fallen before. Technologies have disrupted before. Spiritual awakenings have been proclaimed before. Yet what feels different now is scale: planetary integration, artificial cognition, ecological constraint, and instantaneous global communication converging simultaneously.
The “again-coming” dimension suggests that we are revisiting ancient questions: What is consciousness? How should power be governed? What binds humanity together? These are perennial. But the “arrival” dimension suggests that the material conditions under which we ask them have fundamentally changed. Intelligence may soon be non-biological at scale. Narratives can be algorithmically amplified. Governance failures propagate globally in real time. The human condition itself is technologically entangled.
What all these frameworks share is not optimism, nor technological determinism, nor mysticism. It is a recognition that civilization is becoming reflexive at planetary scale. Humanity is beginning to see itself — cognitively, institutionally, ecologically — as a single interdependent system. That awareness is unstable. It can produce fragmentation or integration, dystopia or renewal. But it signals threshold.
If this is indeed a monumental transition, its defining feature may not be AGI alone, nor digital media, nor global markets. It may be the emergence of meta-awareness: civilization thinking about itself while redesigning itself.
In that sense, the age now forming is neither purely technological nor purely spiritual. It is structural. The infrastructures of cognition, narrative, governance, and ethics are being renegotiated simultaneously. The future is not simply arriving; it is again-coming under altered conditions.
And perhaps that is the most compelling insight of all: when multiple vocabularies begin to describe the same approaching horizon, we are likely not witnessing coincidence. We are witnessing convergence — the early language of a world in transition.
