michael-dean-k/

In October of 2024 I sliced history into eras of my own. Prior to that, my historical timeline was built on sandy approximates. The challenge here is that so many historical eras have different time periods (10, 50, 250 years), and so it requires you to remember specific date ranges for specific things. Unless you’re a historian, you most definitely won’t.

I’ve been long drawn to the Strauss-Howe generational theory, and decided to use this as a historical map of even intervals. They break history into “saeculas,” 80-year cycles, the interval of an average human life, and perhaps not coincidentally, the interval between major world conflicts. They go back to the 1370s, I think, but I’m trying to work through the major milestones in the 400 years before that (which includes the Schism, the Crusades, the founding of Oxford, the Magna Carta, Thomas Aquinas, which all seem relevant to the millennia and the rise from the Dark Ages).

The point of a historical timelines of equal intervals is that (1) it’s easy to remember—and I’ve even given my own names to make them stick—so that (2) any new information, ie: ideas or people, can easily slot into that model. It helps to know the Renaissance Era is 1370, Discovery Era 1487, Scientific Era 1594, and Enlightenment Era 1704, so that when I come across Hobbes in 1600s, I know, oh, that’s the Scientific Era, which makes sense because Hobbes brought the first scientific understanding of political philosophy. Today I made some progress on updating my October 2024 map, which I started in 1095 (the Shism) and wrongly named “the scholastic era” (which is better for the following phase).

Instead I think the start should be in 962, and called “The Schism Era.” The new order (I) kicks off with Otto I becoming emperor through the Pope, which is significant because in the prior 75 years, there was no emperor due to the peak of viking/barbarian raids, and it was the biggest threat of Christianity being erased. Since Otto, the Holy Roman Empire stuck for 8 centuries, until dissolved by Napolean, so this really is a reconsolidation, the exit from the Dark Ages. The awakening (II) is a spiritual crisis, when Rome adds the “filioque” a term that alters the original trinity, this leads to (III) the Schism between Orthodox and Catholic church, and erupts in (IV) a civil war between the Church (the Pope) and the (Holy Roman) Empire at Canossa in 1077.

Then the “Cathedral Era” kicks off in 1095 with the Crusades, which is it’s own new world order, where a French faction of Catholicism (pope-aligned), helps launch (1) a cross-country military coalition that supports the church, which can (2) take back Jerusalem from turks, (3) prevent anti-pope revolutions, and (4) thrwart internal civil wars of feuding knights. This leads to Worms in 1112 (II), which is really the original separation of church and state (though really it’s like 2 separate governments, where the church still has laws and the right to kill). This period is marked by many crusades, the rise of cathedrals from this new order (church having a better military with more resources)—Saint-Denis, Cartres, Notre Dame, Cantebury. There are also “cathedrals of thought” maybe a stretch, but includes Aquinas’s unification of Aristotle and Christianity, along with proto-scholars that would lead to Oxford. Where in the last Era, Christianity had barely survived from Magyar raids, this Era is continent-wide flourishing of building, writing, thinking (and of course, conquering). The awakening (II) featured new religious ideas (Gothic, cults, scholasticism, classicism, exuberance), and the overall exubernace spiraled into crises of King John (IV). He taxed heavily to fund failed crusades, seized lands, and jailed nobles, so this resolved with the Magna Carta (1215), which bounds the king to laws.

Following is the Scholastic Era (1215 on), which coincides with Oxford officially incorporating at a university, but I can’t do that one now… I have to leave in 20 minutes to make it to my father-in-laws memorial on time. The point is, from this morning I now understand two historical cycles that were extremely fuzzy to me. Of course there is a lot more to learn, but I have a map that other things can lock into. Most relevantly, I have a sense of the different inner-saeculuar moves ()from I>II>III>IV), which help imagine possible scenarios for today (2026 is the predicted beginning of I, a new world order).

A few months ago I saw a YouTube video titled something like, “A child born in 2025 is more likely to get killed by AI than graduate college.” What a ridiculous claim. I assumed it was clickbait and didn’t click, but it has jingled around my head enough to the point where I think I can make sense of it’s argument:

• The average p(doom) of an AI engineer is 16%, meaning there’s a 1 in 6 chance of human extinction (put another way, companies have morally rationalized the need to play Russian Roulette—if we don’t do it the bad guys will—, without acknowledging that if they survive and win, they get the consolation prize of comandeering the whole economy).

• 40% of US adults, age 25-34, today, have a bachelor’s degree. If there’s massive job automation and employment, a college degree would be both unaffordable and an unreasonable cost if it were. It’s not unthinkable that <15% of next generation gets a college degree, which makes that sensational claim, weirdly, plausible.

I still think it’s a shaky comparison, confusing two different types of probability, and assuming extreme ASI turbulence. But as someone with a daughter born in 2025, it has gotten me to think about how the societal backdrop to her upbringing could be especially weird. Our circumstance already gets slightly weirder with each generation. Except, maybe next loop will be an unavoidable and disorienting flurry of change that will confuse parents and rewrite all of the conditions for the typical coming of age moment (all the teen movies will be sci-fi, the popular memoirs could be written by transhumanists who have upgraded in unimaginable ways, like they no longer need to sleep because of a new pill, or they can control the genitals of their peers with an app, who knows).

And so now, I find myself drawn to a 2045 forecasting project. Trying to predict the future is typically a huge waste of time (unless you’re gambling and win), which is why I’m going to have AI write the whole thing. This is a rare exception where a writing project makes little sense for a human to do. All I’m going to write are the upfront origin documents, and then Claude Opus 4.5 will read 25,000 sources, write a million words or so, and then organize it all into an interactive, oatmeal-looking website called 2045predictions.com (got it).

Before I run it, here’s something I’m currently thinking through:

What is the omega state? When I look at the popular AI forecasts from 2025, it reads to me like they have a pre-determined end state, only to then use detailed forecasting to make it seem convincing. The AI-2027 forecast seems like they came to their conclusion from very detailed calculations on how a hivemind of 200,000 autonomous coders would evolve month-by-month, but I also suspect that they picked the year 2027 because the following year, 2028, is a US election year, and they want the next administration to take AI safety far more seriously (instead of just insisting we have to beat China). I don’t think there’s anything wrong with this. You kind of have to start with an omega state. The future is so boundless that you need to begin with a guess, a bold outline on the general direction of things.

Here’s my omega: let’s assume humanity survives, and let’s assume technology does unlock hyperabundance that leads to a post-scarcity world, HOWEVER, it’s not utopian because it simultaneously unlocks a new cascade of moral, social, and spiritual crises, dilemmas that will test the timeless primitives of humanity (sex, life, death, consciousness, religion, home, etc.). This omega state makes sense for me because (1) we already know that ethical dilemmas scale with technology, and (2) according to the Strauss-Howe generational theory (from the same guys who coined “milennalis,” “Gen-Z,” etc.), this already tends to happen every 80 years (the length of a human lifespan). A new techno-political order creates a spiritual crises that generates an Awakening, a new value system that shapes society for the next century or so. You know what’s 80 years before Kurzweil’s “singularity” of 2045? The counter-cultural revolutions of the 1960s. What I’m getting at is that the 2040s might have echos of the 1960s, where demographics are divided on core issues and LSD is replaced with consciousness-altering machines (Terence McKenna said that computers are drugs, you just can’t swallow them yet).

We currently define the singularity as “the moment when a computer is smarter than all humans combined,” but that effectively means nothing, and it’s far more useful to have some guesses on how we all might freak out about that happening.

The book Four Thousand Weeks references the average lifespan (76.71 years). This is also 27,999.15 days, which almost exactly lines up with the 1,000 day cycle. A life is 28,000 days. I’m currently starting my 13k cycle. This means by 14k, early 2028, I will be statistically midlife. It is a potentially grueling realization, but something about the 1k cycle makes it seem like NBD. 1,000 days is a long time, especially if you are chase epic things. It is effectively a whole life, a distinct identity. Of course, there is part of you that persists through each molting cycle, but it helps to see each as a rebirth. To think I have 15 more molts ahead of me is to realize I have 15 lives left, more than I know what to do with.

“Two years ago, the critic Ryan Ruby suggested that we are in a golden age of literary criticism. “It is not unusual,” the critic and scholar Merve Emre wrote, ‘to stumble upon an essay on Goodreads or Substack that is just as perceptive as academic or journalistic essays.’”

I want to riff on this cliche of a literary “golden age.” There are many other buzzwords along this kind of thinking: renaissance, revolution, rebellion, rebirth, paradigm shift, movement. Don’t get me wrong, any sort of positive direction in a literary culture is a good thing! I just think each word should mean a specific thing, and“golden age” is something like a pinnacle, a climax state that is very rarely reached in a civilization. I don’t think we’re there. 

It’s worth taking a step back and asking: “if we were in a golden age, how would we know?” Is it the total volume of essays? Total volume of paid essayists? Total volume of “relevant” magazines? Range of topics? Modes of experimentation? Number of geniuses? Quality of anthologies? Cultural divergence? Productive debates? The revival of a lost ethic?

Each of these qualifiers might have their own corresponding word. Maybe a “renaissance” is the return to something that’s been diminished, while “rebirth” is the return of something that actually died and resurfaced organically. 

I think a “golden age” is the very hard conditions of when all of these qualifiers are firing at once. 

• p(1): The 1960s countercultural utopians had two factions, luddites and techno-optimists.
• p(2): A subset of Deadheads were early computer nerds. Stewart Brand called them “computer bums” in the 70s. In the 80s, they evolved into “netheads.” These people established the infrastructure that’s mainstream today. There are dozens of examples, the main one being a college dropout who was first turned onto LSD at a Grateful Dead show in 1972, Steve Jobs.
• p(3): It’s long been known that “WE OWE IT ALL TO THE HIPPIES.” Brand coined that in 1995. But I think the counter-culture really manifested into mainstream culture in the 2010s. Hitchhiking became Uber. Pad-crashing became AirBnB. Free love became Tinder. Organic freak food became Whole Foods. The human potential movement became self-help.
• p(4): However, Branson was off on a critical detail. He didn’t forecast how the decentralized ethos would become radially centralized, and how all the elements of the counter-culture would be sterilized once they scaled through technology. A millennial today can effectively live through the ethos of the hippies but with none of the risk or ownership.
• p(5): The Grateful Dead at the Sphere represents a culmination of this dynamic. The psychedelic trip itself no longer requires a drug,; it can now be experienced for $500 through a technological replica.

I think Trump's assassination attempt might be considered The Fourth Turning in the Strauss-Howe generational theory model. The past turnings have been wars (the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, World War II), but it’s less about a defining conflict, and more about a changing structure of the world. It definitely feels like we’re entering a new world order in more ways than one (America, AI, crypto), but we’ll only know in hindsight. In last cycle it was about American hegemony, in this one I think it will be something like an ASI hegemony. Still points to 2045 as the spiritual crisis.

Elon did the Hail Hitler salute. There are so many interpretations, but here’s a middle-ground take: Maybe when a powerful leader is addressing a crowd, it’s almost an archetypal, symbolic gesture to touch your chest and then point it out, to the sky, imagining it like some projectile that extends to the back of the crowd. I don’t know anything about how this came to be associated with Hitler. Perhaps Elon didn’t do this consciously, and perhaps he’s not autistic, but he’s swimming in the same power dynamics that Hitler was. I think that might even be scarier. It’s not a conscious allusion to Hitler, but worse, he independently derived the same gesture.

There's definitely something to friction and lags. Even if we accelerate int he next few years, I think we're still following that 80-year Strauss-Howe loop. I'd guess 2045 (the "Fifth Great Awakening") could be the cultural rift where the decision to merge with machines or not will be the zeitgeist. That will be the moment where the infinite gets into the nervous system itself (whether XR, BCIs, nanobots, etc.). And I'd bet culture rejects it in a similar way to how the culture rejected LSD in the 60s—similar to psychedelic prohibition, we might develop technology that gets banned until the 22nd century. We are the boomers to the next generation of infinite junkies.