By Victor V. Motti*
I would argue that the conventional assessment is increasingly wrong. In fact, the emergence of increasingly capable artificial general intelligence makes me more convinced that specialist technical skills and accumulated technical knowledge will progressively lose their economic scarcity—and therefore much of their economic value.
The release of ChatGPT 6 Astra has only strengthened this conviction. When an AI system can synthesize enormous bodies of knowledge, reason across disciplines, generate sophisticated technical outputs, and assist almost anyone with tasks that once required years of specialized education, the traditional relationship between knowledge, skill, and economic participation begins to break down.
This is not simply another stage of automation. It may represent a transition in what it means to participate in an economy.
I raised a version of this possibility in 2019,where I suggested that the economic participation rate could eventually approach the zero limit. The provocative idea was not that humans would cease to matter, but almost the opposite: that economic production might increasingly become detached from human labor.
If machines can perform most economically necessary tasks, then employment ceases to be the primary mechanism through which human beings contribute to society. The question consequently changes from:
“What can you produce?”
to:
“What do you choose to make possible?”
That distinction is enormous.
For centuries, human societies have organized education, status, and economic opportunity around scarcity of knowledge and scarcity of technical competence. Becoming a physician, engineer, programmer, scientist, accountant, or lawyer meant acquiring capabilities that relatively few people possessed. Expertise therefore translated into economic power.
AGI challenges precisely this relationship.
When sophisticated technical capability becomes widely available through an intelligent machine, the marginal economic value of possessing the capability personally can decline dramatically. Knowing how to perform a task may become far less important when an intelligent system can perform it—or teach, supervise, augment, and reproduce it—almost instantly.
The scarce resource may consequently move elsewhere.
It may move toward agency.
From economic participation to political participation
If economic participation approaches zero, one possible consequence is that political participation approaches 100 percent. See A Transformation Journey to Creative and Alternative Planetary Futures (2019) (p. 89).
This would represent a profound transformation of civilization.
Today, political participation is often constrained by economic participation. People must work, earn income, maintain households, and navigate institutions before they can devote meaningful time and energy to collective decision-making. Economic necessity occupies much of human existence.
But imagine a planetary civilization in which the production of material necessities requires very little human labor.
The central human question would no longer be simply how to produce wealth.
It would become:
What should humanity do with its freedom?
And that question cannot be answered merely by possessing more technical knowledge.
It requires values.
It requires imagination.
It requires ethical judgment.
It requires the capacity to articulate collective aspirations—and, most importantly, the agency to act upon them.
This is where the future could become considerably more difficult than the transition itself.
A society of abundance does not automatically become a good society. Eliminating scarcity does not eliminate conflict over meaning, purpose, identity, power, dignity, or the direction of civilization.
Indeed, these questions may become more important precisely because technical constraints are disappearing.
The rise of the human political subject
The coming transformation may therefore require a new conception of education.
Instead of educating people primarily to become technically employable, we may need to educate them to become powerful political and ethical subjects.
The virtues that matter most could include imagination, courage, wisdom, empathy, responsibility, discernment, solidarity, curiosity, and the capacity to envision alternative futures.
Technical competence will certainly remain useful. But its economic scarcity may disappear.
Agency may become the new scarcity.
The person who can ask a meaningful question may become more valuable than the person who merely knows an answer.
The person who can imagine a desirable future may become more important than the person who can optimize an existing system.
And the person who can persuade a community to pursue a shared future may matter more than the person who can merely execute the technical instructions necessary to build it.
This could produce an extraordinary inversion of modernity.
Industrial civilization elevated the producer.
The information age elevated the knowledge worker.
The AI age may elevate the choosing human.
But there is a dangerous assumption
There is, however, one enormous assumption embedded in this vision.
It assumes that AGI will not also capture the sphere of human agency.
That assumption cannot simply be taken for granted.
If artificial intelligence eventually becomes capable not only of solving technical problems but also of generating values, persuading populations, coordinating collective action, constructing political narratives, and making strategic decisions, then the transition from economic participation to political participation may not necessarily produce greater human freedom.
It could produce the opposite.
We could arrive at a civilization where humans are economically liberated—but politically irrelevant.
That is the deeper planetary question.
The future of AGI is therefore not merely about whether machines will take our jobs. That framing is already too narrow. The more consequential question is whether humans will retain meaningful agency over the direction of civilization itself.
If technical knowledge becomes abundant, while agency remains human, we could witness an extraordinary renaissance of human creativity, political participation, ethical experimentation, and planetary imagination.
But if AGI becomes the primary generator of goals as well as the primary executor of them, humanity could discover that it has solved the problem of economic scarcity only to encounter a far deeper problem:
Who gets to decide what the future is for?
That may ultimately be the defining question of the Planetary Era.
Victor V. Motti is the author of Thus Spoke Arta: How Our Planet Is Entering a New Era (2026), The Loom (2025), Playbook of Foresight: Designing Strategic Conversations for Transformation and Resilience (2025), Planetary foresight and Ethics: A Vision for Humanity’s Futures (2025), A Transformation Journey to Creative and Alternative Planetary Futures (2019).
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Showing posts with label skill. Show all posts
Showing posts with label skill. Show all posts
Monday, September 7, 2026
Wednesday, August 19, 2026
The Future In 50 years’ Time
By Victor V. Motti*
1. What knowledge and skills will still be relevant in 50 years’ time?
Raw, wild imagination—and the confidence to express your unique mind to the world. In an age when AI can reproduce existing knowledge, the capacity to imagine what does not yet exist may become one of humanity’s most valuable skills.
2. How will research work change when the majority of books are digitised and AI agents can quickly cross-reference facts and deliver ready-made results?
Research may increasingly mean going back to forgotten philosophy, neglected intellectual traditions, and foundational questions—and deeply questioning entrenched assumptions about reality, knowledge, and existence rather than simply retrieving information.
3. Which capabilities of the human brain are currently underestimated, and how can we develop them with the help of AI?
The ability to hold multiple contrasting ideas, perspectives, and identities simultaneously without descending into cognitive confusion or madness may be profoundly underestimated. The “multi-head attention” architecture of AI models could offer an intriguing inspiration for developing analogous forms of human cognition—a possible synthesis between Transformer architectures and the human brain.
4. How can we model personalised curricula using AI to suit individual needs?
If AI radically reduces the need for human economic participation, education may need to shift from preparing people primarily for employment toward enabling maximum political and civic participation—cultivating the next generation of social innovators, movement leaders, and architects of new forms of collective life.
5. Will we have to choose between the humanities and technical sciences in the future? Or can they be combined—and if so, how, given that the thinking styles of humanists and engineers tend to differ?
We can begin by recognizing mathematics as a language, alongside natural languages and programming languages. This opens the possibility of discovering or creating an entirely new form of language—perhaps currently considered science fiction or unimaginable—that could connect these modes of thought. Such a language might provide new affordances for the collective mind emerging between humans and human-like intelligence.
*Victor V. Motti is the author of Thus Spoke Arta: How Our Planet Is Entering a New Era (2026)
1. What knowledge and skills will still be relevant in 50 years’ time?
Raw, wild imagination—and the confidence to express your unique mind to the world. In an age when AI can reproduce existing knowledge, the capacity to imagine what does not yet exist may become one of humanity’s most valuable skills.
2. How will research work change when the majority of books are digitised and AI agents can quickly cross-reference facts and deliver ready-made results?
Research may increasingly mean going back to forgotten philosophy, neglected intellectual traditions, and foundational questions—and deeply questioning entrenched assumptions about reality, knowledge, and existence rather than simply retrieving information.
3. Which capabilities of the human brain are currently underestimated, and how can we develop them with the help of AI?
The ability to hold multiple contrasting ideas, perspectives, and identities simultaneously without descending into cognitive confusion or madness may be profoundly underestimated. The “multi-head attention” architecture of AI models could offer an intriguing inspiration for developing analogous forms of human cognition—a possible synthesis between Transformer architectures and the human brain.
4. How can we model personalised curricula using AI to suit individual needs?
If AI radically reduces the need for human economic participation, education may need to shift from preparing people primarily for employment toward enabling maximum political and civic participation—cultivating the next generation of social innovators, movement leaders, and architects of new forms of collective life.
5. Will we have to choose between the humanities and technical sciences in the future? Or can they be combined—and if so, how, given that the thinking styles of humanists and engineers tend to differ?
We can begin by recognizing mathematics as a language, alongside natural languages and programming languages. This opens the possibility of discovering or creating an entirely new form of language—perhaps currently considered science fiction or unimaginable—that could connect these modes of thought. Such a language might provide new affordances for the collective mind emerging between humans and human-like intelligence.
*Victor V. Motti is the author of Thus Spoke Arta: How Our Planet Is Entering a New Era (2026)
Thursday, August 13, 2026
A Terran Note on the Boötes Void
By Victor V. Motti*
Cosmology describes it as a supervoid: a product of the large-scale evolution of matter, gravity, and the expanding universe.
But a Type III thought experiment asks a different question:
What if a structure that appears to us as a feature of natural cosmology could, in some far-future scenario, become an object of engineering?
A Type III civilization would not necessarily build a larger ship, a larger city, or even a larger machine.
It might build absence.
It might clear or maintain enormous low-density regions for energy collection, computation, communication, observation, thermal management, strategic separation, or forms of privacy beyond anything a planetary civilization could require. It might act not on individual stars alone, but on the large-scale dynamical structure of an entire galaxy.
This is, of course, speculation. The Boötes Void is not evidence of extraterrestrial engineering. It is a natural cosmological structure, and it should be studied first and foremost as such.
Yet the thought experiment remains valuable precisely because it asks what engineering could mean at the farthest technological horizon. An apparently natural cosmic phenomenon can serve as a provocation for imagination without becoming an argument for artificiality.
The question is not:
“Who built the void?”
Nor is it merely:
“Nobody could have built it.”
The more responsible question is:
“What would a civilization capable of engineering cosmic-scale absence actually look like?”
That is the Terran impulse.
We see emptiness and ask not whether it was made, but whether something like it could ever be made.
This is, of course, speculation. The Boötes Void is not evidence of extraterrestrial engineering. It is a natural cosmological structure, and it should be studied first and foremost as such.
Yet the thought experiment remains valuable precisely because it asks what engineering could mean at the farthest technological horizon. An apparently natural cosmic phenomenon can serve as a provocation for imagination without becoming an argument for artificiality.
The question is not:
“Who built the void?”
Nor is it merely:
“Nobody could have built it.”
The more responsible question is:
“What would a civilization capable of engineering cosmic-scale absence actually look like?”
That is the Terran impulse.
We see emptiness and ask not whether it was made, but whether something like it could ever be made.
From Fluid Mechanics to Galactic Dynamics
One way to imagine this far-future possibility is through the analogy of engineering fluids.
Humans already manipulate dynamical media across remarkable scales. We work with flows in pipes and aircraft, ocean circulation, weather systems, river basins, combustion chambers, industrial processes, and planetary energy cycles. We have learned not merely to observe such systems, but increasingly to predict, redirect, stabilize, and engineer them.
We have also begun to describe galaxies dynamically.
But a galaxy is not literally an ordinary fluid.
Its stars rarely collide. Much of its large-scale behavior is more appropriately described by a collisionless distribution in phase space, governed by kinetic descriptions such as the Jeans equations.
Yet this distinction does not weaken the analogy. It deepens it.
A galaxy can be understood as a vast dynamical medium: not a fluid in the ordinary hydrodynamic sense, but a gravitationally organized phase-space ocean.
One way to imagine this far-future possibility is through the analogy of engineering fluids.
Humans already manipulate dynamical media across remarkable scales. We work with flows in pipes and aircraft, ocean circulation, weather systems, river basins, combustion chambers, industrial processes, and planetary energy cycles. We have learned not merely to observe such systems, but increasingly to predict, redirect, stabilize, and engineer them.
We have also begun to describe galaxies dynamically.
But a galaxy is not literally an ordinary fluid.
Its stars rarely collide. Much of its large-scale behavior is more appropriately described by a collisionless distribution in phase space, governed by kinetic descriptions such as the Jeans equations.
Yet this distinction does not weaken the analogy. It deepens it.
A galaxy can be understood as a vast dynamical medium: not a fluid in the ordinary hydrodynamic sense, but a gravitationally organized phase-space ocean.
Stars are its visible constituents.
Gas participates in shocks, cooling, feedback, and star formation.
Dark matter supplies much of the underlying gravitational architecture.
Gravity generates collective motion, orbital structure, resonances, mixing, collapse, accretion, and long-term redistribution.
Across billions of years, galactic evolution continuously reshapes the distribution of matter, energy, angular momentum, and phase-space density.
A sufficiently advanced Type III civilization might therefore develop an engineering discipline analogous to fluid mechanics, but operating on an altogether different substrate:
Gas participates in shocks, cooling, feedback, and star formation.
Dark matter supplies much of the underlying gravitational architecture.
Gravity generates collective motion, orbital structure, resonances, mixing, collapse, accretion, and long-term redistribution.
Across billions of years, galactic evolution continuously reshapes the distribution of matter, energy, angular momentum, and phase-space density.
A sufficiently advanced Type III civilization might therefore develop an engineering discipline analogous to fluid mechanics, but operating on an altogether different substrate:
A Kardashev Scale of Dynamical Mastery
The Kardashev scale is commonly understood as a progression in accessible energy: planetary, stellar, and galactic.
But perhaps it can also be understood as a progression in mastery over increasingly vast dynamical media.
The transition is not merely quantitative. It is ontological.
To us, a galaxy appears as a collection of stars moving through an almost empty universe.
To a sufficiently advanced civilization, the same galaxy might appear more as a river appears to us: a structured dynamical environment with currents, gradients, reservoirs, boundaries, instabilities, feedback loops, and potentially controllable flows.
Our question is:
“How do we move through the galaxy?”
The Type III question may be:
“How do we shape the galaxy?”
The Galactic Medium
Our concepts of engineering have always been conditioned by the media we can manipulate.
Early humans shaped stone, wood, and fire.
Agricultural civilizations learned to organize soils, water, crops, animals, and biological cycles.
Industrial civilization mastered combustion, machines, electricity, chemistry, and mass energy flows.
The emerging Type I planetary civilization is beginning—unevenly and dangerously—to influence atmospheric composition, global information networks, biological systems, and planetary-scale feedback processes.
A far older Type III civilization might encounter another frontier:
not gravity as a material substance, but the engineering of gravitationally organized matter, motion, and phase space.
Its infrastructure might not resemble machines in any familiar sense. It could consist of extraordinarily slow interventions, accumulated across millions or billions of years.
At such a scale, the distinction between astronomy and engineering begins to blur.
What we call a galactic phenomenon might, from the perspective of such a civilization, be infrastructure.
None of this implies that observed structures are artificial.
It means only that the boundary between “natural structure” and “engineered structure” may become observationally ambiguous when the engineers operate slowly enough, patiently enough, and on sufficiently immense scales.
The Terran Question
This is what makes the Boötes Void philosophically interesting.
We should not look at a great empty region of the universe and conclude that someone constructed it. The natural explanation remains the starting point, and the evidence for it must be evaluated on cosmological grounds.
The Kardashev scale is commonly understood as a progression in accessible energy: planetary, stellar, and galactic.
But perhaps it can also be understood as a progression in mastery over increasingly vast dynamical media.
The transition is not merely quantitative. It is ontological.
To us, a galaxy appears as a collection of stars moving through an almost empty universe.
To a sufficiently advanced civilization, the same galaxy might appear more as a river appears to us: a structured dynamical environment with currents, gradients, reservoirs, boundaries, instabilities, feedback loops, and potentially controllable flows.
Our question is:
“How do we move through the galaxy?”
The Type III question may be:
“How do we shape the galaxy?”
The Galactic Medium
Our concepts of engineering have always been conditioned by the media we can manipulate.
Early humans shaped stone, wood, and fire.
Agricultural civilizations learned to organize soils, water, crops, animals, and biological cycles.
Industrial civilization mastered combustion, machines, electricity, chemistry, and mass energy flows.
The emerging Type I planetary civilization is beginning—unevenly and dangerously—to influence atmospheric composition, global information networks, biological systems, and planetary-scale feedback processes.
A far older Type III civilization might encounter another frontier:
not gravity as a material substance, but the engineering of gravitationally organized matter, motion, and phase space.
Its infrastructure might not resemble machines in any familiar sense. It could consist of extraordinarily slow interventions, accumulated across millions or billions of years.
At such a scale, the distinction between astronomy and engineering begins to blur.
What we call a galactic phenomenon might, from the perspective of such a civilization, be infrastructure.
None of this implies that observed structures are artificial.
It means only that the boundary between “natural structure” and “engineered structure” may become observationally ambiguous when the engineers operate slowly enough, patiently enough, and on sufficiently immense scales.
The Terran Question
This is what makes the Boötes Void philosophically interesting.
We should not look at a great empty region of the universe and conclude that someone constructed it. The natural explanation remains the starting point, and the evidence for it must be evaluated on cosmological grounds.
But we may still ask:
What would engineering look like if the engineers possessed the lifetime of a galaxy?
What would engineering look like if the engineers possessed the lifetime of a galaxy?
A human engineer thinks in years.
A civilization may think in centuries.
A Type I planetary civilization may learn to think in millennia.
A Type III civilization might think in galactic timescales.
At that scale, engineering could become difficult to distinguish from what we now call natural evolution. A structure gradually reshaped over hundreds of millions of years would not resemble a construction project to an observer arriving afterward.
It would look like cosmology.
That is the ultimate foresight lesson of the Boötes Void.
The universe contains phenomena that are entirely natural. It may also contain possible technological forms whose signatures we are presently incapable of recognizing, not because they must exist, but because our imagination remains adapted to short-lived machines, local construction, and human timescales.
A Type I planetary civilization may learn to think in millennia.
A Type III civilization might think in galactic timescales.
At that scale, engineering could become difficult to distinguish from what we now call natural evolution. A structure gradually reshaped over hundreds of millions of years would not resemble a construction project to an observer arriving afterward.
It would look like cosmology.
That is the ultimate foresight lesson of the Boötes Void.
The universe contains phenomena that are entirely natural. It may also contain possible technological forms whose signatures we are presently incapable of recognizing, not because they must exist, but because our imagination remains adapted to short-lived machines, local construction, and human timescales.
The responsible Terran question is therefore not a claim about what the void is.
It is an inquiry into what intelligence might become.
“What would a civilization capable of engineering cosmic-scale absence actually look like?”
That question extends the Kardashev scale beyond energy consumption alone. It suggests that civilizational advancement may also be measured by a growing capacity for dynamical mastery.
We Terrans began by learning to live within the flows of our planet.
The far future may begin when a civilization learns to engineer those flows.
And perhaps the Type III horizon is reached when a civilization no longer sees the galaxy as a collection of objects moving through emptiness, but as a vast dynamical medium:
a gravitational ocean,
It is an inquiry into what intelligence might become.
“What would a civilization capable of engineering cosmic-scale absence actually look like?”
That question extends the Kardashev scale beyond energy consumption alone. It suggests that civilizational advancement may also be measured by a growing capacity for dynamical mastery.
We Terrans began by learning to live within the flows of our planet.
The far future may begin when a civilization learns to engineer those flows.
And perhaps the Type III horizon is reached when a civilization no longer sees the galaxy as a collection of objects moving through emptiness, but as a vast dynamical medium:
a gravitational ocean,
a phase-space ecosystem,
a structure of currents, reservoirs, resonances, and slow transformations.
Something in which intelligence learns not merely to travel— but to flow.
a structure of currents, reservoirs, resonances, and slow transformations.
Something in which intelligence learns not merely to travel— but to flow.
*Victor V. Motti is the author of Thus Spoke Arta: How Our Planet Is Entering a New Era (2026)
Sunday, June 14, 2026
AI, Neo-Socialism, and the Rise of a New Hierarchy
By Victor V. Motti*
For centuries, intelligence has been one of humanity's most prized scarce resources. Entire educational systems, professional hierarchies, and social structures have been built around identifying, rewarding, and concentrating cognitive ability. The modern world is, in many ways, an IQ-sorting machine.
But what happens when intelligence ceases to be scarce?
Artificial intelligence may be doing something unprecedented in human history: transforming intelligence from a personal possession into a public utility. Like electricity, clean water, or internet access, cognitive power is becoming something that can be summoned on demand. If intelligence becomes as accessible as turning on a tap, then possessing raw intellectual horsepower no longer distinguishes one person from another.
This possibility carries a strangely paradoxical implication. AI may simultaneously democratize intelligence while creating entirely new forms of hierarchy. In this sense, AI could become one of the most powerful engines of a new kind of neo-socialism: a world where access to cognitive capability is broadly distributed, yet social distinctions survive by migrating elsewhere.
The logic is familiar. Whenever a resource becomes abundant, status shifts to whatever remains scarce.
When books were rare, literacy was power. When printing made knowledge abundant, prestige migrated toward education, interpretation, and expertise. When information became universally available through the internet, attention became the scarce commodity.
If intelligence itself becomes abundant, what replaces it?
Taste: The New Aristocracy
In a world where everyone possesses access to superhuman reasoning, the central question is no longer whether you can solve a problem.
The question becomes whether you can recognize the right problem.
Two people equipped with identical AI systems can produce radically different outcomes. One may create a forgettable business, while another invents a transformative institution. One may generate endless mediocre art, while another produces beauty that moves millions.
The difference is not intelligence.
The difference is taste.
Taste is the capacity to recognize quality before it becomes obvious. It is the ability to choose among infinite possibilities. AI can generate a thousand designs, but it cannot tell us which one deserves to exist. AI can write a hundred songs, but it cannot determine which melody captures the spirit of an age.
As intelligence becomes commoditized, aesthetic judgment may become the new elite skill.
Agency: The Scarcity of Action
Utilities do not act.
Water does not build canals. Electricity does not invent industries. Intelligence, no matter how abundant, does not automatically create outcomes.
The person who acts still matters.
In a world overflowing with answers, execution becomes the bottleneck. Everyone may know what should be done. Few will actually do it.
Willpower, persistence, courage, and discipline become increasingly valuable because they cannot be outsourced. AI can reduce uncertainty, but it cannot eliminate fear. It can recommend action, but it cannot take responsibility.
The future may belong not to the smartest people, but to those willing to move first.
The Return of the Human
Ironically, the more intelligent our machines become, the more valuable uniquely human qualities may become.
Charisma cannot be downloaded.
Trust cannot be generated on command.
Reputation cannot be fabricated indefinitely.
If everyone can produce flawless reports, perfect business plans, and sophisticated analyses, people will increasingly judge one another not by outputs but by character. Who can be trusted? Who has skin in the game? Who has demonstrated commitment over decades rather than prompts?
Similarly, lived experience acquires new value. Intelligence can describe grief, but it cannot replace mourning. It can explain love, but it cannot experience devotion. It can analyze courage, but it cannot choose sacrifice.
The things that make us human become more precious precisely because they remain stubbornly resistant to automation.
Values in an Age of Infinite Arguments
AI introduces another strange possibility.
When every argument can be generated instantly and every position defended eloquently, being intellectually correct becomes less important.
What matters is commitment.
Values become the new differentiator.
A society flooded with intelligence may discover that wisdom was never primarily about knowing more. It was about choosing what deserves allegiance.
What principles would you sacrifice for?
What future are you willing to build?
What responsibilities are you willing to assume?
These questions cannot be answered by computation alone.
Story as Power
Perhaps the greatest source of future status will be narrative.
Humans do not merely live by facts. They live by stories.
Nations are stories. Religions are stories. Brands are stories. Civilizations are stories.
An AI can provide information, but people still need meaning. They still need purpose, identity, and belonging.
The leaders of the future may therefore resemble myth-makers more than technocrats. Their power will come not from possessing superior knowledge but from creating compelling visions that others choose to inhabit.
In a world of abundant intelligence, the ability to tell a meaningful story may become more influential than the ability to solve a technical problem.
The New Hierarchy
The coming age may not eliminate hierarchy. It may simply relocate it.
The old hierarchy rewarded intelligence.
The new hierarchy may reward taste, agency, trust, values, and narrative.
Everyone may have access to the same cognitive water supply, yet society will still distinguish between the gardener, the architect, the bartender, and the priest. They all draw from the same source, but they direct it toward different ends.
This is why AI may become both the most egalitarian and the most stratifying technology ever created.
It democratizes intelligence while elevating purpose.
The SAT score loses significance. The résumé loses prestige. Raw IQ becomes less important than the question that follows:
Given god-like tools, what kind of ancestor do you choose to be?
The deepest divide of the AI age may not separate the intelligent from the unintelligent.
It may separate those who know what they are for from those who do not.
*Victor V. Motti is the author of Thus Spoke Arta: How Our Planet Is Entering a New Era (2026)
Thursday, June 12, 2025
BushidoMoon: Celebrating the Planetary Foresight Under the Full Moon
By Steve Kantor*
In a world speeding toward hyper-digitization and disconnection, we need not only new technologies—but new rituals. Rituals that reawaken our connection to nature, the cosmos, and each other. This is exactly what we’re beginning to cultivate through an initiative called BushidoMoon—an experiment in planetary consciousness, seasonal celebration, and bold human connection.
The inspiration began with the visionary ideas presented in the book Planetary Foresight and Ethics, which calls us to reimagine the future of humanity by re-aligning with the rhythms of the Earth and cosmos. The book urges us to embrace celestial observations, seasonal celebrations, and nature-connected practices as powerful ways to regenerate human meaning and solidarity in a time of planetary crisis.
After reading the book and connecting with its author, I suggested the use of the term Terran—as a poetic yet powerful way to emphasize our shared identity as beings of this planet. But the next question was immediate and practical: how do we find more Terrans? How do we build not just the thought leadership, but the action network for this emerging planetary culture?
As someone with an entrepreneurial mindset, I realized the need for more grassroots, embodied, and joyful expressions of the book’s deeper vision. That's when I proposed something deceptively simple: a full moon gathering, small at first, playful yet meaningful, rooted in nature and inspired by the ancient warrior code of Bushido.
BushidoMoon was born.
We alpha- and beta-tested the idea in tiny groups. But it was on our third try—at the Strawberry Moon in June 2025—that the magic really happened. Fourteen individuals, from a wildly diverse range of backgrounds, joined us under the moonlight in Bishop Garden, one of the most scenic and sacred-feeling places in Washington, DC.
We shared a potluck dinner amid blooming flowers, green grass, and a warm spring breeze. We laughed. We made toasts. We talked about nature, ethics, the cosmos—and the kinds of futures we want to live. The author of Planetary Foresight and Ethics joined us and shared how the book presents an alternative to globalization: a planetary vision that prioritizes human flourishing over economic competition, and cosmic connectedness over digital distraction.
We ended the evening with a Human Connection Circle. Each person spoke one word to describe how they felt at that moment. Then, spontaneously and joyfully—we howled at the moon. Why? Because this wasn’t about solemn ceremonies or rigid beliefs. It was about celebrating life boldly, together, in the spirit of play.
And that, too, is a vital insight from Planetary Foresight and Ethics: that creative play, including with technology and AI, is not frivolous. It is central to the preferred futures of humanity. As automation liberates us from traditional labor, we are called to explore creative complexity, to blur the lines between reality and virtuality, and to experiment with new ways of being human.
BushidoMoon is one such experiment.
It’s an invitation to reconnect—with yourself, with others, with nature, with the cosmos. It is tech-facilitated but grounded in in-person humanity. It is bold, weird, warm, and wildly needed.
So here’s your call to action:
If you’d like to start a BushidoMoon in your city or country, or if you want to join a virtual circle, I would love to connect with you. Just send a note to the Contact Us button on this blog. Let’s gather under the next moon, wherever you are on Earth.
* Steve Kantor is a member of the scientific council of the Alternative Planetary Futures Institute.
In a world speeding toward hyper-digitization and disconnection, we need not only new technologies—but new rituals. Rituals that reawaken our connection to nature, the cosmos, and each other. This is exactly what we’re beginning to cultivate through an initiative called BushidoMoon—an experiment in planetary consciousness, seasonal celebration, and bold human connection.
The inspiration began with the visionary ideas presented in the book Planetary Foresight and Ethics, which calls us to reimagine the future of humanity by re-aligning with the rhythms of the Earth and cosmos. The book urges us to embrace celestial observations, seasonal celebrations, and nature-connected practices as powerful ways to regenerate human meaning and solidarity in a time of planetary crisis.
After reading the book and connecting with its author, I suggested the use of the term Terran—as a poetic yet powerful way to emphasize our shared identity as beings of this planet. But the next question was immediate and practical: how do we find more Terrans? How do we build not just the thought leadership, but the action network for this emerging planetary culture?
As someone with an entrepreneurial mindset, I realized the need for more grassroots, embodied, and joyful expressions of the book’s deeper vision. That's when I proposed something deceptively simple: a full moon gathering, small at first, playful yet meaningful, rooted in nature and inspired by the ancient warrior code of Bushido.
BushidoMoon was born.
We alpha- and beta-tested the idea in tiny groups. But it was on our third try—at the Strawberry Moon in June 2025—that the magic really happened. Fourteen individuals, from a wildly diverse range of backgrounds, joined us under the moonlight in Bishop Garden, one of the most scenic and sacred-feeling places in Washington, DC.
We shared a potluck dinner amid blooming flowers, green grass, and a warm spring breeze. We laughed. We made toasts. We talked about nature, ethics, the cosmos—and the kinds of futures we want to live. The author of Planetary Foresight and Ethics joined us and shared how the book presents an alternative to globalization: a planetary vision that prioritizes human flourishing over economic competition, and cosmic connectedness over digital distraction.
We ended the evening with a Human Connection Circle. Each person spoke one word to describe how they felt at that moment. Then, spontaneously and joyfully—we howled at the moon. Why? Because this wasn’t about solemn ceremonies or rigid beliefs. It was about celebrating life boldly, together, in the spirit of play.
And that, too, is a vital insight from Planetary Foresight and Ethics: that creative play, including with technology and AI, is not frivolous. It is central to the preferred futures of humanity. As automation liberates us from traditional labor, we are called to explore creative complexity, to blur the lines between reality and virtuality, and to experiment with new ways of being human.
BushidoMoon is one such experiment.
It’s an invitation to reconnect—with yourself, with others, with nature, with the cosmos. It is tech-facilitated but grounded in in-person humanity. It is bold, weird, warm, and wildly needed.
So here’s your call to action:
If you’d like to start a BushidoMoon in your city or country, or if you want to join a virtual circle, I would love to connect with you. Just send a note to the Contact Us button on this blog. Let’s gather under the next moon, wherever you are on Earth.
* Steve Kantor is a member of the scientific council of the Alternative Planetary Futures Institute.
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