We are entering an era in which speed itself is changing.
Change is no longer simply faster. It spreads and transmits through society at something approaching the speed of information itself.
In the past, shifts in social structures, technological paths and systems of thought often unfolded over generations. Today they are compressed into a single lifetime. We may witness transformations in technology, society and culture that previously took a century or more. Changes overlap before they are fully understood. Judgments are overwritten by the next reality before they can settle into experience.
AI's sudden arrival has made this process unmistakable and accelerated it further. What changes the world's rhythm is the entire system of near-instant technologies beneath it: electricity, networks, computing and immediate feedback. These allow change to reach reality before understanding catches up.
Over the past two years, AI has begun systematically entering core domains of human cognition. In protein-structure prediction, for example, AlphaFold greatly expanded access to structural models and shortened many prediction tasks. But predicted structures are not experimental validation. Research into every protein's function, dynamics and drug effects cannot be equated with one rapid calculation. This is more than a symbolic breakthrough: it signals that the cost of time is being rewritten and that humanity has entered a phase of transformation grounded in near-instant information technologies.
In such an environment, value no longer accumulates linearly, nor does experience settle naturally. Capabilities, paths and judgments once considered durable have not necessarily been disproven. Extreme compression of time has removed the premises that sustained them. This is not one generation's mistaken judgment; the era's operating mode has changed.
This explains the sense of misalignment I have repeatedly described:
Among people I know, some born in the 1970s feel left behind, some born in the 1980s question old formulas, and some born in the 1990s and 2000s are already trying new paths. Age is not a uniform measure of understanding, but mismatches between generational experiences recur in our conversations. Family education, schools and mainstream narratives still draw on models of stability established in the 1970s and 1980s to explain a reality moving at light speed.
When transformation unfolds at this pace, we can no longer project the future linearly from existing experience. History, books and experience remain important, but provide reference frames more than directly reusable answers.
Independent thought and action acquire a new meaning in such an era.
They mean retaining judgment amid continuous acceleration and avoiding complete absorption by speed. We can scarcely expect one system to support individuals indefinitely, or wait for the world to grant us ample time to understand. We must find structure within uncertainty and recognize patterns at light speed.
Humanity may never have experienced a phase quite like this:
The future no longer unfolds slowly, but strikes individuals almost in real time.
The old world has not fully departed, yet the new one is already operating.
At this overlap, the scarce resource is no longer answers themselves, but the ability to keep recalibrating and moving.
Our generation of thinkers must not only find ways forward for our own unfolding lives, but also do what we can to leave the next generation approaches to thought and action they can understand and practice.