This piece opens a series on artificial intelligence and large language models as a possible watershed in how humans develop knowledge, governance, and law. It invites the reader to imagine standing beside the great shifts of the ancient world — and asks what it means that comparable structural change might now be underway through digital systems.
The essay frames today’s shift as a digital metamorphosis: LLMs changing how machines handle language, judgment, and automation of cognitive work — with implications for interaction design, decision support, business models, and society at large.
A central thread compares our moment to Karl Jaspers’s Axial Age (roughly 800–200 BCE), when foundational ideas emerged across civilisations — and reminds us that transformative ideas have rarely been adopted evenly or kindly. History mixes enlightenment with control, book bans, and dystopian shadow.
Later instalments in the series were planned to trace the policy arc toward legislation (including the EU AI Act) and to stage the case for regulation through a structured dialog — themes that belong to the full essay rather than this brief note.
Full text. Because this site publishes only one quarterly highlight here, the complete article — including sections on selective adoption, “the dystopian shadow,” and the Shakespeare quotation — lives on Substack.