Tech • AI • Robotics • Game
How to Survive the Technological Adolescence?
5/10TL;DR
Rapid advances in AI, biotechnology and other powerful tools are increasing human capability faster than social and psychological maturity, raising calls for new forms of civic and personal formation.
KEY POINTS
Technological power outpacing maturity
Modern societies now wield unprecedented means of action through nuclear weapons, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, information systems and autonomous weapons, yet they have not clearly developed matching self-restraint or collective wisdom. The central concern is not capability itself, but whether institutions and citizens can govern the consequences of tools that amplify human action at historic scale.
A civilization in “technological adolescence”
The current condition is framed as a form of technological adolescence, borrowing a phrase associated with Carl Sagan. In this view, humanity resembles an adolescent newly freed from parental limits but not yet experienced enough to manage risk, a dangerous stage made sharper by overlapping ecological, political, geopolitical, economic and cultural stresses.
The metacrisis and AI acceleration
Thinkers across disciplines have described the convergence of crises as a polycrisis, metacrisis or meaning crisis. What appears new is not any single emergency, but their simultaneity and interaction, compounded by AI, which can accelerate decision-making, persuasion, automation and error across many domains at once.
Why rites of passage matter
Many traditional societies treated adulthood as something that had to be socially produced rather than biologically assumed. Rites of passage and initiations marked the transition from dependency to responsibility, often through demanding tests that taught endurance, self-command and reliability under pressure.
Two functions of initiation
These practices historically served two main purposes. First, they trained people to master fear, pain, frustration and impulse, what contemporary language might call stronger agency. Second, they integrated individuals into a community as accountable members with duties, not just rights, shifting them from people who need protection to people others can depend on.
Examples from traditional cultures
Some initiatory forms were harsh and sometimes dangerous, including ordeals such as wearing gloves filled with bullet ants or solitary hunts that tested resilience and competence. There were also distinct female initiations, along with more specialized forms tied to kingship, shamanic roles and brotherhoods, showing that cultures often built maturity in role-specific ways.
Critique of overprotection
A major argument is that contemporary culture often moves in the opposite direction, normalizing overprotection and low tolerance for adversity. Ideas linked to safetyism, including safe spaces, trigger warnings and a broader effort to reduce emotional discomfort, are criticized as extending childhood expectations into adult life rather than preparing people to face reality.
Culture war as a dispute over adulthood
The wider culture war is cast as a conflict over what an adult human being should be. On this reading, identity practices that celebrate fluid, consequence-free self-definition are seen not as new forms of maturity but as signs of prolonged infantilization, where society is expected to adapt endlessly to individual sensitivity.
No simple return to old rituals
Despite the defense of initiation, there is no straightforward call to revive older rites in their original form. Large, pluralistic societies are too complex to impose a single shared passage, and modern populations no longer inhabit one common moral world. Any renewal would likely need new institutional or cultural forms adapted to diverse communities.
Collective and individual responses
One proposed response is cultural federalism, allowing different communities to test different models of adulthood rather than enforcing one national ideal. In the absence of broad institutions, individuals are urged to build maturity through voluntary challenge, responsibility, confrontation and discipline, effectively turning adult formation into a personal task.
Beyond adulthood through metacognition
The argument goes further than basic adulthood, proposing metacognition as the next stage of development. By training attention on attention itself, in a way influenced by meditation and cognitive science, individuals may strengthen self-awareness and mental regulation, capacities seen as increasingly important in an era when digital systems can influence not just physical action but cognition itself.
CONCLUSION
As AI and other technologies multiply human power, the core issue is whether societies can rebuild forms of maturity strong enough to govern that power. Without new ways to cultivate responsibility, self-command and shared obligation, technical progress may deepen instability rather than mastery.
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