Hindsight is 2025
Five years on, the Age of Intelligence is no longer theory, its here. The "big bang" moment is obvious in hindsight: the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022. Since then, we’ve watched investment explode, and the same familiar dance between capital, technology, and society begin again. We are squarely in the irruption phase. Frenzy is yet to come.
What follows is the original essay from 2020 — written at a time when the shift was visible only at the edges.
I believe that we're currently living near the end of the 5th techno-economic paradigm according to the model described by Carlotta Perez in her book Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital.
Starting roughly 49 years ago when Intel launched the first commercial mirco-processor, the 5th techno-economic paradigm (also known as the information age), has largely defined our notions of the modern world. The computational metaphor has installed itself into our collective mind, and the products and infrastructure that have sprung from it: computers, the internet, mobile phones, and all the associated software have created massive productivity gains across virtually every industry (and immense wealth for it's winners). But we're also starting to see cracks in this paradigm, it has failed to deliver on many of its uptopian promises. All paradigms must end, and I believe this one is now in the mature phase.
Below I'll summarize the model presented by Perez and explain why we're already starting to see the irruption phase of what I believe to be the 6th paradigm - The Age of Intelligence.
A Model for Progress
In her 2002 book Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital Carlotta Perez lays out a model of how "progress" happens in our world. It's a dynamic dance between technology, capital, and society, that, through a series of great surges and recessions, propels the world to higher levels of productivity and wealth.
The model proposes that since the industrial revolution there have been 5 "techno-economic paradigms", each lasting roughly 50 years. During each paradigm a set of new technologies takes the world by storm, fundamentally altering the economy and later the social institutions globally, as they propagate from initial applications outwards to all industries. These technologies alter the workings of the world so fundamentally that they actually change the mental model of those living through it, hence becoming more than a technology but a full on paradigm. This also indicates why
The 5 paradigms described in the book are:
Each paradigm passes through four stages: Irruption, Frenzy, Deployment, and Maturity — moving from explosive early adoption to a period of saturation, consolidation, and diminishing returns.
By Perez’s timeline, the Information Age is now well into its maturity phase.
History suggests that this is when a new paradigm’s irruption phase begins to overlap with the tail end of the current one, setting the stage for a dramatic shift.
The 6th Paradigm
I believe the 6th paradigm will be known as the "Age of Intelligence", and that it's already underway. In the last 5 years or so that the core technology constellation has coalesced:
And we're starting to see demos which truly bend our expectations of what technology can do. We'll see in retrospect what people consider the "big bang" event is, but I'd be willing to guess that high-profile demos like the AlphaGo tournament, or GPT-3 will be seen as likely candidates. These are not mere incremental improvements - they are hints of a new mental model, where “software” is less about explicit rules and more about adaptive intelligence.
What to Expect
If the Age of Intelligence follows Perez’s model:
Closing thought
If Perez is right, we’re living through the chaotic first act of the 6th paradigm. Just as steam powered the railways, electricity lit up cities, and silicon transformed communication, intelligence - in machines and in augmented humans - will define the decades ahead.