Around us, others are thinking about the future, about AI, about geopolitics and uncertainty. They think so the rest of us don’t have to. Some think things will get better, worse, better again, or more profitable.

They hold the answers — or so we’re meant to think.

But history tells a different story. We repeat ourselves far more often than we like to admit. Someone once said: “The best prediction of new behaviour is past behaviour.” Still, we want to believe that this has never happened to humanity before.
Yet patterns return.
And so do we.
Ebb. Flow.
And so on.

How should we think about what is happening now? What are we facing?

Three times before, a technology has set us free.
Three times, we lost ourselves.
And three times, we returned to the human.

Now we stand here again, in the energy-hungry light of AI, ready to make the same journey a fourth time. But to understand the fourth, we need to know the first three. And when we do, we start to see the most stable ground we have: how humans actually respond when the world changes.

The steam engine, 1780s.


The liberation of the body. We no longer had to toil in the soil to create value. Power moved into the machine and the world erupted in steel, smoke and rhythm. Factory cities like Manchester, Glasgow, Birmingham grew like mushrooms from the ground. But the worker became a cog. The modern factory became a place that generated exclusion. And from that exclusion grew a movement to reclaim belonging. Technology solved the labour, but it didn’t give it meaning.

100 year later. 

Electricity lit the world anew. Mass production made everything possible, and everything the same. Every city had the same lamps, the same factories, the same products. Efficient, yes, but also soulless. In response, a new desire emerged: craftsmanship, artistry, the local. When everything became identical, the unique became worth defending.

Fast-forward again.



Digitalization, 2005–2010. We liberated information and set the world in motion — all knowledge available, all communication instant. Yet we lost our breath. When everything was connected, we forged connections so close that we lost our connection to the world. When everything could be measured, the unmeasurable became invisible. Out of the overflow came a new economy: experience, presence, meaning. We began to pay for stillness, for silence, for feeling something again.


And now, with the body, industry and information already freed, it is thought itself that is being released.



AI writes, draws, codes, analyses — faster, cheaper, more tirelessly than ever. Intelligence has been automated with the same conviction as always: more speed means progress.



But history says otherwise.


When everything becomes possible, nothing remains important

When thought itself is mass-produced, meaning becomes scarce.



And so the pendulum swings back.

Toward the human.

Toward the unpredictable.

Toward trust, empathy, judgement.


The Fourth Industrial Logic: Cognition

If mechanics liberated muscle, electricity liberated industry, and digitalization liberated information — then cognition liberates thinking itself.

And as always, when a human capability is overtaken by technology, that very capability becomes sacred.

After mechanics, we worshipped the hand.
After electricity: craftsmanship.
After digitalization: presence and memory.
After cognition, we will worship judgement.
The reflective.
The intuitive.
The human.

The human always returns as value.

When code becomes free, empathy becomes expensive.
When logic is automated, intuition becomes a luxury.
When everything can be explained, the inexplicable becomes what moves us.

And perhaps this is what we are entering now: a time when value isn’t created by thinking faster, but by thinking wiser.

Not by producing more answers,
but by finding better questions.
Not by understanding the world as it is,
but by imagining what it could become.