We are living in a new phase of the Enlightenment

Conversations at the front lines of digital technology, especially AI, inevitably wander through morality, economics, religion, evolution, culture, and consciousness. What unites these domains is not agreement but absorption: they increasingly appear as problems already within the scope of computational power, or soon to be.

This absorptive capacity is not incidental. It is a defining feature of our time. As Michel Serres once said, ‘We are steering things that we didn’t used to steer.’ This opens a crucial moral question for our time: Can we master this capacity to steer?

In 1994, I described an earlier version of this dynamic as Infrastructures of Enlightenment, tracing how roads, print, and information networks accelerated the capacity to gather the world into infrastructure. Today, digital systems have become a far more pervasive infrastructure, absorbing and transforming nearly every aspect of life at unprecedented speed and scale. This new Enlightenment is not defined by reason alone, but by calculation’s capacity to reformat the world—and its tempo now shapes our experience of time itself. The challenge is not simply to slow down, but to learn how to live, think, and govern within an Enlightenment that no longer unfolds at human pace.

The question is no longer whether computation will shape our lives, but how life itself is reorganized when the speed of computation steers nearly every aspect of experience.

Essential Essays in this Series