🔮 Exponential View #558: Davos & reinventing the world; OpenAI's funk; markets love safety; books are cool, robots & AI Squid Game++

Hi all,

I just got back from Davos, and this year was different. The AI discussion was practical – CEOs asking each other what’s actually happening with their workforces, which skills matter now. At the same time, I saw leaders struggling to name the deeper shifts reshaping our societies. Mark Carney came closest, and in this week’s essay I pick up his argument and extend it through the Exponential View lens.

Enjoy!

Davos and civilizational OS

Mark Carney delivered a speech that will echo for a long time, about “the end of a pleasant fiction and the beginning of a harsh reality.” Carney was talking about treaties and trade but the fictions unravelling go much deeper.

Between 2010 and 2017, three fundamental inputs to human progress – energy, intelligence, and biology – crossed a threshold. Each moved from extraction to learning, from “find it and control it” to “build it and improve it.” This is not a small shift. It is an upgrade to the operating system of civilization. For most of histor…