The Fourth Axial Age

A symbol of the great turning: where artificial intelligence meets the ancient question of what it means to be human.

Our Great Turning in the Age of AI - The Silicon Finger Pointing at the Moon and the Carbon-Based Paradise Regained

by Guru Ruru — translated and adapted for English readers by Dr. Ying Lee

To the sapiens now caught between two worlds — one collapsing, one still being born — and to the divine beings about to awaken.

Three times before, humankind has stood at a hinge in its own history: when we first walked out of the garden, when we first bowed down to gold, and when Socrates and the Buddha first asked us to look inward.

This is the fourth.

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About the Title

In 1949, the German philosopher Karl Jaspers noticed something strange in the historical record. Between roughly 800 and 200 BCE, in four separate corners of the world with no way to speak to each other, humanity’s greatest teachers had stepped forward at once. Confucius and Laozi were walking through China. The Buddha was sitting under a fig tree in India. The Hebrew prophets were crying out in the wilderness of Israel. Socrates was asking his impossible questions in the streets of Athens. Jaspers called this window the Axial Age — the axis, or pivot, on which the whole of human history had turned.

This book proposes that we have lived through three such turnings, and are living through the fourth right now.

The four turnings, briefly:

The First Axial — the day we first walked out of the garden, when some ancestor planted a seed and, with it, invented the fence, private property, and the fear of tomorrow.
The Second Axial — when we raised temples, empires, and gods of gold, and learned to worship whatever we could hold in our hands.
The Third Axial — Jaspers’s own, the great awakening of reason, prophecy, and philosophy.
The Fourth Axial — the one whose tremors you can already feel in your phone, your workplace, and the strange silver mirror of AI. The one still being born.

Every axial age has broken something, and set something free. This book is a map for what to break, and what to set free, in the one we are living through now.

Note: Volume One is complete and free to read. Volumes Two through Five are coming into the world month by month. When you finish Volume One, you’ll find three ways to continue.