It's a cool time to be alive. According to some, we're building our own demise. According to others, our ultimate flourishing. Honestly, I can't say I'm remotely informed enough to truly judge that. But I can read between the lines. Our path to a good future will require us to adapt more than we've done in a while. The last 80 years or so has been a trend of us becoming incrementally better at dealing with adverse conditions. We've done some epic things on our arc so far; physical transportation became pretty efficient, energy is utilized more broadly and efficiently than ever, we can build new stuff at massive scales, we can maintain our biological and psychological existence better each year (i.e. healthcare and psychotherapy), we're figuring out the economics of spaceflight at scale, and much more. Amazing technologies are now at the forefront of human life. Our application and distribution is perhaps subpar, but it's a start. Those are all great feats and give great reasons to be optimistic. The problem is that I don't think most of these creations stem from the **necessity to adapt**. We've made things easier and more efficient across the board, but we were able to because - at least in the new West - we didn't have oppressive superpowers requiring us to change. With abundance of resources, capitalism and democracy deployed by the hegemony of the world has been a pretty efficient system. That might change soon. I'm not talking about Russia, China or terrorism. I'm talking about the other elephant in the room: AI. I'm not here to share my thoughts on how AGI or ASI will develop exactly, because I have no clue. But there's something I've been more concerned with: what are the things I know will happen, that will require us to change? And how? Let's start with what I think I know: - Digital infrastructure is running our society ('software is eating the world') - Our individual talents aren't the primary means of production in the digital realm anymore There's a lot that can spur from putting those together. They seem obvious to me, but if you have a different take, please do share. There are a lot of first order consequences I can think of: - Junior software developers will be redundant - Senior software developers will be scarce - Open social platforms relying on user generated content will become irrelevant Each of those deserves its own essay. Maybe I'll get around to it, but for now I'll skip over them in playfully blissful ignorance. Because I want to talk about the second order consequence here: we'll **need to adapt**. And more so than we have done in a while. I think the catalyst to that adaptation is our ability to learn, and fast.