I am not exactly expert — a futurologist, but the more I think about the future course of events, the more it looks to me as if we cannot infer much from the past as we think we can, or as much as we would like to. The future brings a new set of rules and a different kind of a game we need to play. Here are some random thoughts about this.

What I am trying to present here is similar to the idea that past returns in the market are not a guarantee of future returns, and yet, so much of the analysis in finance is done exactly this way. This is not something that uneducated have come up, it’s something the brightest minds in finance swear by. So how should the rest of us survive the third cycle?

What is the Third Cycle?

What I am calling the “third cycle” is simply a set of challenges humanity may be facing in the future, from this moment on. Since it is “the third cycle” obviously there were two before it. There were more and each challenge could be seen as one. But let’s just look at these huge three ones I am thinking about here.

The First Cycle

First one is/was the longest one. Since the first human, or what looked like a human, evolved, up to the beginning of the 1st Industrial Revolution. The main characteristic of the first cycle was the fact that humanity was on average mostly concerned with pure survival. For millennia, this was the main occupation.

The Second Cycle

The second cycle started with the major economic / technological development that lasted up to the 200os or so. Its hard to be precise. Tyler Cowen in the Great Stagnation would probably see the beginning of the end for what I call the second cycle, in the beginning of 70s. The second cycle was the period when humanity knew mostly one direction — up. This was the period of the fastest growth in opportunity, technology, wealth, employment.

Mini cycles that were happening were mere transitions that followed a similar pattern. Technology would disrupt and soon, after a short reconfiguration, society and economy would adapt and move on the same way as before.

The Third Cycle

The third cycle looks like the second one on steroids, however, the processes are in many ways different and challenges facing the human race are, again, different ones.

In the first cycle, the challenge was mostly survival. The second one saw mostly challenge of understanding the world and mastering it. The third cycle poses a challenge where humans become even more integral part of the change. From our perspective, challenges are not exogenous — presented to us by the complexity of the world around us, but we are actively shaping them.

Some of the obvious examples are climate change and technological change. Humans are having a global impact in both of these and our values are challenged, the same ways as is our perception of the society and of our economic system. Efficiency and growth are still interesting, but consequences and tradeoffs are becoming issues that are framing societal, political and scientific process.

Our solutions to old problems, create new challenges that are not distributed nor affect everyone the same way. Inequality is one of the interesting issues because it is rooted in technology, it is shaped by politics and it threatens the stability of the current system.

Challenges we face today are the ones we were only seeing in dystopian sci-fi movies. Artificial intelligence and related moral concerns, self-driving cars and the safety choices they will have to make, rich corporate elites having access to goods and services others may never be able to enjoy. The inequality that is worse than one in the Gilded era, but on the other side, the new “poor” are the richest generation that ever inhabited the earth. Tradeoff between non-robot work and leisure. The tradeoff between robot-work and human leisure.

Challenges we are facing cannot be solved by expecting the old patterns. Mini-cycles are so fast that disruptions look like long term. The political process is slower and not catching up.

New technologies are good. Jobs eventually get replaced. Maybe so, however, the issues are not the same. Jobs are not the same, skills cannot be changed fast enough. In the third cycle, disruptions do not sort themselves out. Solutions are needed for the seemingly permanent transition.

Global problems need global solutions that hardly can be efficient due to ongoing spats and the classical tragedy of the commons type of problems. The Third Cycle is starting and I am not sure we are ready…

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