I’m sure, like me, you’re feeling that the world has descended into chaos.

The old world order, established after the Second World War, the reality we’ve shared as more or less stable ground with our parents and their parents, has been shaken, turned upside down, and dumped on the floor without any indication of how it will be put together again.

The kidnapping of foreign leaders, the unprecedented war against Iran, the pathetic and criminal way the Epstein files have been handled, exposing victims while ensuring not one perpetrator has been jailed, are maddeningly wrong.

But all of this staging and acting and structuring of narratives is a big smoke screen.

Because what has been quietly shuffled to the back of the deck, relegated to a cursory concern, is the radical acceleration of Artificial Intelligence and automation, and how these technologies are changing our world in an unprecedented way in both scale and speed.

It should be bothering a lot more people that we have no realistic plan, or legal and monetary frameworks with exactly how we are going to deal with the hundred million jobs or more that are going to be lost forever in the western world before this decade is out. The positivity bias that jobs will be created through this transition doesn’t mention that for every 100 jobs lost maybe 5 or 10 will be created, and temporarily at that.

One way or another, a revolution is coming.

I hope the voice of we the people will be firm and resolute and dangerous, like one of my favorite scenes in Fight Club, where Tylor Durden reminds those a corrupt leader that the true power remains with the people “who connect your calls, who haul your trash, guard you while you sleep”.

But I fear, if we don’t wake up soon, if we’re not seriously proactive now, and we’re going to have to organize and go way beyond merely putting serious pressure on our governments, and come up with a way to mitigate these changes together that we can already see with the flattening out of entry level white collared jobs everywhere and the ramping up of robotic automation already pushing many blue collared work into extinction, we will be at the mercy of doing what we’ve always done – react.

Being human, we’ve winged this in the past, leaned on one of our greatest strengths in our innate ability to adapt to a changing environment. But too much change, to fast, and without a plan or knowledge about how to navigate an utterly alien set of circumstances, could bring about a revolution where we the people loose our identity, our purpose, our agency.

We must not become eaters, with our hands out, trusting in the good graces of the big tech companies or our governments who are rapidly becoming their neutered lapdogs. History teaches us that this doesn’t end well.