“Embracing, resisting and struggling with transformative change begins with confronting legacy structures and inherited systems. Transformative change touches, challenges, invalidates and ultimately supersedes the systems that influence our lives in innumerable ways. Thomas Friedman and others describe the present moment as the polycene: a time when multiple simultaneous crises demand comprehensive understanding of what is. And this understanding underscores the limits of our prior structures and instincts. Because reality, historically, was so depressing and seemed so unlikely to be improved that humans invented fantasy worlds and destinations: the Garden of Eden, Heaven, Valhalla, capricious gods. As a result of invented theories and explanations – untrue, unsustainable, yet widely believed and stubbornly constituting articles of faith – we are not prepared for what we are facing.
“To successfully react resiliently to today’s multifarious issues and maintain our agency, we have to think and act differently. Newer tools focused on monitoring and analyzing reality will utilize AI directly. This utilization will confront a few thousand years of practice, assertion and explanation – and the social structures built on that foundation. AI will challenge church, religion, school, education, government and the rule of law because many of those structures, useful though they were historically, do not live up to the insights and discoveries of a reality-focused, factful approach to thinking and living.
“This doesn’t happen because humans suddenly awaken with a realistic understanding. We don’t proceed deliberately or thoughtfully. Understanding happens as humans use tools and then apply the logic of each tool to their daily lives and world.
When we outsource thinking to AI, we outsource our moral capacity, our ability to ask: What does this mean? Should we do this? … We need new thinking, new approaches that work outward from the output AI brings us.
“The result of tool-based, device-first living has confounding outcomes: isolation occurs when teens rely on phones instead of social interaction; tools incorporating software and robotics displace human jobs; AI performs better than humans in accounting, stock picking, x- ray reading, tutoring. Technology concentrates power in fewer hands, creating cascading issues, from lack of privacy to undermining the global rules- based order.
“There is nothing inherently wrong with AI performing better than humans in many areas. The only wrong is blindly adopting the tool while expecting all social, legal and moral norms to mesh seamlessly with these new technologies, or assuming we no longer need such norms. These tools will challenge the very validity of our social, legal and moral norms, so we must engage with the reality of what is and respond with wisdom and transparency.
“Morality emerges not from commandments but from a practice of questioning, guided by simple principles: question everything; do no harm; be compassionate and humble; follow truth wherever it leads. We can reject lies or distortions, call out falsehoods, champion true assessments of reality. It may be simple, but it’s not easy. Morality starts in kindness and respect, but it does not end there. It emerges; it is not dictated. It requires thinking and patience. New technologies require new moralities, new solutions.
“AI can detect and replicate patterns better than humans. But it cannot genuinely question them. It can simulate questioning but not perform the moral act of questioning. When we outsource thinking to AI, we outsource our moral capacity, our ability to ask: What does this mean? Should we do this? What are the consequences here?
“The resistance and struggle come from wanting to hold onto older ways of thinking that disregarded what is – favoring instead assertions and judgments. We are experiencing what I call a soundless collision between older, legacy, inherited systems and practices and new realities, capabilities and technologies. Humans have always used tools and came up with rationales later. Once we invented TV, the Internet, cell phones and AI, life within us and around us began to change. But the structures we created – church, school, government – were caught in the same old logic and thinking that birthed them. As Albert Einstein is often credited with saying, ‘We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.’
“We need new thinking, new approaches that work outward from the output AI brings us. The good news: We have created tens of thousands of reality monitors. We now know more about what is happening in our world than ever before. This is our embarrassment of riches. The problem comes from our prior commitments, our premature cognitive commitments to outdated, ineffectual ways of thinking and examining the world and ourselves in it.
Disenthralling ourselves from rationales and explanations accepted without question
“I next want to address a major question presented to us in this canvassing of experts: As opportunities and challenges arise due to the positive, neutral and negative ripple effects of digital change, what cognitive, emotional, social and ethical capacities must we cultivate to ensure effective resilience?
“Abraham Lincoln said – 10 weeks after issuing the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation – ‘The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves.’ People today need to disenthrall themselves from rationales and explanations accepted without question, from made-up stories and explications no longer adequate. Second, we need to disenthrall from accepting patterns without questioning them.
“Questioning is our new superpower – we must use it wisely. We are leaving a world of culturally enshrined fictions to enter a world of observed reality. The first cognitive, emotional, social and ethical capacities we need to cultivate constitute a full awareness of how unique and different the AI reality-focused world is from the world that tradition and culture presented to us.
“Few people are addressing the capacities that embody effective resilience to the dislocating realities of digital change. I use the word dislocating intentionally: Our bodies, not simply our minds, have been the primary locus of our engagement with the world. We felt rain, wind, hot and cold, summer and winter, love, childbirth and death in our bodies. We cannot escape being embodied. And yet, AI arrives as a body negator. We are experiencing the world less directly. As AI brings it to us moment-to-moment via screens, glasses, tablets and games we are becoming more disembodied, more otherworldly.
We must examine new creations with an eye to seeing how they make us feel, how they disrupt prior cognitive commitments, how they distort or enhance our self-image. … We surrender our consciousness to the logic of our tools. We have always done this and we will continue to do so.
“As compute advances, AI immerses itself in human thinking to become an aid to human thinking. From writing a business proposal to writing a novel, from creating unreal human portraits to mimicking human voices and impersonating us in deepfakes – the capacities we must cultivate to ensure effective resilience are critical thinking, compassion/empathy and a dispassionate commitment to looking at mirror images without getting lost in them.
“This is not insubstantial. We must examine new creations with an eye to seeing how they make us feel, how they disrupt prior cognitive commitments, how they distort or enhance our self-image.
“We have graduated from being passive participants in an unfathomable world to being active understanders and explorers. This makes us determiners of our own fate. This is a quantum leap in consciousness for which we are mostly unprepared because the framers of new realities have been so enamored of their discoveries and capabilities they have mostly ignored how technologies change us as we use them.
“We surrender our consciousness to the logic of our tools. We have always done this and we will continue to do so. Now we need to acknowledge that fact and act wisely and accordingly.
What practices and resources will enable resilience?
“The foremost practice to enable resilience is a resource all of us have: questioning existing social and conceptual structures and especially the explanations and rationales that underpin them: organized religion determining moral perspectives; churches defining who is anointed and worthy; schools based on production models that accrue more value to school norms than to the students’ outcomes; governments lying about what they are doing and why. We now have the tools – AI being foremost among them – to morally monitor human activity and address these distortions. That is the first step towards resilience.
“The first and most consequential thing for all of humanity to do to effect widespread resilience is to commit to factfulness without prior cognitive commitment or specious rationales. This is a tall order for tribal, militia-based human organizations. The tribal mentality commits only to protecting the tribe, which is ‘always correct and can do no harm.’ Of course, those beliefs are not true and never will become true.
Resilience emerges from understanding; from undertaking realistic assessments of what is and acting accordingly. We must act with intention to use our best resources to address and mitigate problems. The final action we might take to reinforce human and systems resilience is to recognize we need both empirical rigor and meaning-making. AI can help with the first but humans must do the second.
“The practice of committing to factfulness and then exploring without premature cognitive commitments will truly enable resilience. Then no one can upset our equilibrium because we have not committed to a particular ideology or point of view, but we look at climate change, or immigration patterns, or starvation, or nuclear weapons proliferation dispassionately and clearly.
“There has never been a time when we had more data about the world, nor a time when we needed more to examine and think through what that data is telling us and how we might do the most for the most based on what we see and know. We have unprecedented access to data about poverty, disease, climate and inequality – yet fail to act on what we know. We must move data-driven understanding to the forefront of decision-making.
“A word about ‘commitment to factfulness’ and ‘data’: I understand that these are not self-evident solutions. Facts don’t interpret themselves. Data requires frameworks. So, to avoid naive empiricism, I want to be clear: I recognize that we must continue to pursue and refine our pursuit of truth, following it wherever the facts lead. Then, with open minds, to the best of our abilities, we must interpret the truth. This entails embracing complexity, because in the polycene complexity is ground zero, it is always there.
What actions must we take right now to reinforce human and systems resilience?
“The first action we should take is to embrace data without any prior cognitive commitments. So, out the window go ‘isms,’ religions, dogmas and ‘the way it has always been done.’ That is not to say we might not adopt older, wiser ways; but the facts come first. Wise souls like Jiddu Krishnamurti and Eckhart Tolle have been encouraging humanity in this direction for years. But the trick is that now we are up against it. The polycene will not slow down or wait for us to catch up. We must act with intention to be able to use our best resources to address and hopefully mitigate problems before they spin out of control.
“To reinforce human and systems resilience and retain our agency we must organize based on our most accurate understanding and calibration of what is. This is not typically the way we have assembled to organize reality. Climate change won’t be affected by our tribal affiliation; the polar ice caps won’t melt slower because we are Democrat or Republican. AI acceleration is not altered by how good or bad we envision ourselves to be; robotics and digital improvements won’t make workers’ jobs any less likely to be taken over or to disappear.
“Resilience emerges from understanding; from undertaking realistic assessments of what is and acting accordingly. We must act with intention to use our best resources to address and mitigate problems.
“The final action we might take to reinforce human and systems resilience is to recognize we need both empirical rigor and meaning-making. AI can help with the first but humans must do the second. The onus of factfulness is meaning. Pattern recognition is the first step; making it meaningful and enhancing human life is the most important step.”
What new vulnerabilities might arise? What new coping strategies are important to nurture?
“The vulnerability we are most likely fall prey to is that of ease and facility. Things that used to take more effort will become effortless, or – more to the point – thoughtless: ‘The AI will do that so I don’t have to think about it.’ Such facility is seductive and likely to overwhelm us if we don’t apply rigorous discipline to maintaining our own awareness and consciousness.
The new coping strategies that will be important to teach and nurture include: questioning and re-questioning the answers AI gives us; meta-watching the AI process to better understand how it works; re-skilling those whose jobs have been affected by AI, with a view to making all individuals more effective in the emerging economy.
“When Louis Mountbatten told Mahatma Gandhi that without British rule, the Indian continent would descend into chaos, Gandhi replied, ‘Yes, but it will be our chaos.’ We must maintain our own agency to have a say in what we want to choose. Things like writing a paper, sending an email, thinking through a proposal, paying a bill – all will become easier and, in a measure, thoughtless. But therein lies the trap. We must maintain an awareness of what AI is doing and how we feel about that doing. We can appreciate the help and also question the answers. Once we go along with the AI, just assuming it is right without analyzing and questioning – then we’re in trouble. So, skepticism is essential.
“The new coping strategies that will be important to teach and nurture include: questioning and re-questioning the answers AI gives us; meta-watching the AI process to better understand how it works; re-skilling those whose jobs have been affected by AI, with a view to making all individuals more effective in the emerging economy.
“A significant vulnerability stems from AI’s actual problems – the hidden biases in training data, the looming issue of energy consumption, which touches virtually every advanced civilization on Earth, the concentration of power which AI has wrought and which advances billionaires and tech bros, sometimes at the expense of ordinary people. These are issues that must be addressed wisely and with broad consensus. …
“The question arises, what would a ‘reality-focused’ school look like? What would governance based on ‘factfulness’ actually do?
“While there isn’t the space to elaborate fully here, our educational system would become open and exploratory. The structure of a school could change from a factory metaphor to exploiting personal capabilities. No longer governed by tests which served industry, schools would invent new paradigms of personal aspiration and possibility using AI to enable broad personal growth.
“Governance based on factfulness would be responsive to new realities of, say, climate change, declining bee populations and vanishing wildlife, advancing investment in wind, solar and oceanic endeavors to clean up the biosphere – all based on the facts of human need and evolution. There’s a lot to see.”
This essay was written in January 2026 in reply to the question: “AI systems are likely to begin to play a much more significant role in shaping our decisions, work and daily lives. How might individuals and societies embrace, resist and/or struggle with such transformative change? As opportunities and challenges arise due to the positive, neutral and negative ripple effects of digital change, what cognitive, emotional, social and ethical capacities must we cultivate to ensure effective resilience? What practices and resources will enable resilience? What actions must we take right now to reinforce human and systems resilience? What new vulnerabilities might arise and what new coping strategies are important to teach and nurture?” This and 200-plus additional essay responses are included in the 2026 report “Building a Human Resilience Infrastructure for the AI Age.”