There is something irresistible about believing that one happens to be alive at the turning point of history. Ordinary generations merely live and die; fortunate generations witness the transformation of civilisation. Nathan Gardels, introducing the latest issue of Noema, raises precisely this possibility. Artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, genetic engineering, environmental crisis and the erosion of inherited religious and political frameworks may, he suggests, be forcing humanity back to first principles. Perhaps we are entering another "Axial Age?" Perhaps, not.
It is a grand idea, but before declaring ourselves inhabitants of Axial Age II, it is worth asking whether Axial Age I really existed. The term comes principally from the German-Swiss philosopher Karl Jaspers (1883-1969), who identified an extraordinary period roughly spanning 800 to 200 BC during which transformative religious and philosophical movements appeared across widely separated civilisations. In China came Confucius and Laozi; India produced the Upanishadic traditions and Buddhism; Greece produced its philosophers; Israel produced the great prophetic tradition. These societies were not simply accumulating new information. Human beings seemed to be standing outside inherited myth and custom and asking universal questions about being, morality, suffering, justice, transcendence and the good life.
That much is genuinely remarkable. Confucius, the Buddha, Socrates and the Hebrew prophets were not exchanging conference papers. These cultures were geographically separated and in important respects intellectually independent, yet within a comparatively limited historical period they generated traditions that would structure much of humanity's intellectual and religious life for the next two and a half millennia.
Jaspers thought something profound had happened. Human beings became more reflective about themselves and their limitations. Myth was no longer simply inhabited; it could be examined. Existing political arrangements could be judged against standards transcending the local ruler and tribe. The individual acquired a new kind of interiority and moral responsibility. Charles Taylor (1931- ), later described this development as a "great dis-embedding", in which human beings became capable of standing intellectually outside the immediate social and cosmological order into which they had been born.
There is something powerful in this picture, but historians have good reason to be suspicious of its tidiness. Six centuries is a rather generous definition of an "age." Greece, Israel, India and China did not undergo identical transformations. Important intellectual developments occurred before and after Jaspers's proposed period. Christianity, rather conspicuously, appears after the conventional Axial Age despite becoming one of the most consequential transformations in human history. Islam comes much later still. A scholarly critique of Jaspers consequently argues that his supposedly empirical universal history threatens to become a myth of its own, imposing unity upon developments whose differences may be at least as important as their similarities.
That does not make the concept useless. "Renaissance", "Enlightenment" and "Industrial Revolution" are also labels placed retrospectively upon complicated processes whose participants did not wake one morning and discover that a new historical epoch had officially begun. Historical concepts earn their keep not by possessing perfectly sharp boundaries but by allowing us to notice significant patterns.
Used in that modest sense, the Axial Age identifies something worth noticing: separated civilisations underwent unusually consequential expansions of moral, philosophical and religious reflection, and the resulting traditions endured.
The dangerous move is to transform that observation into a law of history and then announce that it is happening again.
This is where Noema becomes particularly interesting. Gardels argues that humanity once again faces conditions capable of producing an axial transformation. The first period emerged amid warfare, social upheaval, urbanisation and technologies such as writing that expanded the scale on which ideas could be preserved and communicated. Our own period has globalisation, artificial intelligence, planetary computation, synthetic biology, geopolitical conflict and immigration problems. Inherited institutions command diminishing trust, while inherited religions no longer provide a universally shared framework. Humanity may therefore once again be forced to reconsider what it is, where it belongs and what it ought to become.
There is considerable force in this analogy. Artificial intelligence in particular represents more than another useful machine. The steam engine increased physical power. The telephone extended communication. The computer automated calculation. AI intrudes into activities that human beings have traditionally associated with cognition itself: language, reasoning, image production, scientific discovery, prediction and perhaps eventually forms of autonomous AI decision-making.
That inevitably reopens questions we thought modernity had settled. What is intelligence? What is consciousness? What distinguishes a human being from an artefact? If machines can reason, what is special about human reason? If synthetic biology can redesign organisms, what does "natural" mean? If genes can be deliberately altered, where does therapy end and human manufacture begin?
If artificial systems eventually exceed human beings across most cognitive domains, what becomes of the assumption that humanity occupies the commanding intellectual position on Earth?
These are not merely engineering questions. They are philosophical and ultimately religious questions. In that sense Noema is right. Technology is paradoxically forcing metaphysics back into the room. The twentieth century sometimes imagined that sufficiently advanced science would cause the old questions to evaporate. Instead, sufficiently advanced science has made them harder to avoid. The ability to manufacture increasingly life-like systems forces us to ask what life is. The possibility of machine intelligence forces us to ask what mind is. Genetic engineering forces us to ask what human nature is and whether it possesses boundaries that ought not to be crossed.
Technology has not abolished philosophy. It has weaponised its thought experiments. Nevertheless, Noema makes a much larger leap when it suggests the content of the coming axial transformation. Gardels imagines AI-assisted planetary awareness producing a renewed recognition of humanity's embeddedness within nature. Humanity becomes decentered, while "planetary sapience" and ecological interdependence provide something approaching a new sacred framework. AI, in this account, may perform a role analogous to writing during the first Axial Age, expanding the scale of human awareness and allowing humanity to perceive Earth as an interconnected system.
Perhaps. But this begins to sound less like the discovery of an emerging Axial Age than a description of the Axial Age that a particular section of the twenty-first-century intelligentsia would like to have. The vocabulary gives the game away: planetary consciousness, ecological relationality, re-embedding, sacred Nature and a decentering of humanity. These may contain valuable insights, but they are already familiar themes in contemporary environmental philosophy. Predicting that the next transformation of human consciousness will vindicate one's present philosophical commitments is perilously close to appointing oneself spokesman for history.
The original Axial Age, if it existed, did not produce one worldview. It produced astonishing disagreement. Confucianism was not Buddhism. Buddhism was not Greek philosophy. Greek philosophy was not Hebrew prophecy. Their understandings of God, self, nature, salvation, politics and ultimate reality differed profoundly. What united them, to the extent that anything did, was not a common doctrine but a widening of the questions human beings were capable of asking. If we are entering another axial period, we should expect the same thing.
AI may encourage planetary ecological consciousness. It may equally generate a revival of Christianity by forcing people to reconsider whether human beings possess a spiritual nature irreducible to computation. It may encourage materialism by convincing people that minds are machines. It may generate new religions centred upon artificial intelligence. It may produce an aggressive humanism defined precisely by resistance to machines. It may strengthen nationalism as people seek smaller communities in response to planetary abstraction. It may generate philosophies we presently lack the vocabulary even to describe. A genuine Axial Age should surprise its prophets.
There is another problem. The original axial transformations unfolded across centuries. We are trying to diagnose ours while living inside it. That produces an enormous selection effect. Every major technological innovation looks world-transforming to the generation experiencing it. The printing press transformed civilisation. So did industrialisation, electricity, mass literacy, Darwinism, railways, radio, antibiotics, nuclear weapons, computers and the internet.
If each transformation constitutes an Axial Age, the concept ceases to distinguish anything.
The test must therefore be stronger than technological disruption. An axial transformation should alter the categories through which civilisation understands existence. It should produce ideas capable of surviving the technologies that stimulated them. Socrates remains intellectually alive after 2,400 years. Buddhism still structures the lives of hundreds of millions of people. The Hebrew prophets still speak through Judaism and Christianity. Confucius still influences East Asian civilisation.
Will this be discussed in 2,500 years' time? Possibly, but that is not the right question. The question is whether the intellectual and spiritual transformations generated in response to AI will still structure human self-understanding in 4426. We cannot know.
This also exposes the curious self-importance concealed within claims that we are entering a new Axial Age. Human beings repeatedly imagine themselves living at the end or beginning of history. Religious movements expect apocalypse. Revolutionaries announce a new human being. Marxism expected history to culminate in communism. Technological futurists anticipate the Singularity. Environmental movements sometimes describe the present as humanity's final opportunity to save itself. Perhaps we are simply constitutionally unable to believe that we occupy an ordinary century.
Yet there is one respect in which our age really is different from Jaspers's. The first supposed Axial Age was plural and geographically dispersed. Our world is electronically connected almost instantaneously. An intellectual transformation arising today need not develop independently in China, India, Europe and the Middle East. Ideas can become global within hours.
That may actually work against the original axial pattern. Instead of several civilisations generating different solutions to common existential pressures, algorithms could produce what Otto Scharmer, in the forthcoming Noema issue, calls an "epistemic monoculture": a computational mode of knowing that progressively flattens alternative ways of understanding the world. Gardels recognises precisely this danger. AI might enlarge human awareness, or it might homogenise it.
That possibility deserves more attention than the attractive phrase "AI-xial Age." The great danger may not be that humanity lacks a new universal consciousness. It may be that humanity acquires one.
Civilisations have historically generated intellectual resilience through disagreement. Athens argued with itself. Religious traditions divided into schools. Philosophical systems attacked rival systems. Different civilisations developed radically different accounts of reality. Truth emerged, when it emerged at all, from an ecology of competing perspectives.
A planetary AI system trained upon the accumulated textual output of humanity could broaden that ecology, but a small number of systems mediating knowledge for billions of people could also narrow it dramatically. A civilisation in which everyone asks the same machines what to think might possess more information than any previous civilisation while exhibiting less genuine intellectual diversity. That would be an axial transformation of sorts, but not necessarily one Jaspers would have welcomed.
So, is the Axial Age concept relevant today? Yes, provided we resist turning it into prophecy. It reminds us that technological and social upheavals can generate transformations far deeper than changes in machinery or government. They can alter what people understand themselves to be. Writing may have helped create new forms of reflective consciousness. Printing helped transform religious and political authority. Industrialisation changed relationships between humanity, work and nature. Digital technology is altering memory, identity and social interaction. AI may go further by forcing us to reconsider intelligence itself.
But we cannot know whether this is a new Axial Age because axial ages are visible mainly in the rear-view mirror. People living in 500 BC did not receive a notification informing them that civilisation had entered one of history's decisive periods. They argued, worshipped, fought, wrote and died. Centuries later, philosophers discerned a pattern.
Perhaps people in the year 3000 will look back upon our period and see another such transformation. They may identify artificial intelligence as its catalyst. They may instead regard our obsession with AI as one of the quaint intellectual fashions of the early twenty-first century.
They might even conclude that the great transformation was religious rather than technological, or that it occurred somewhere we are not presently looking. The useful lesson from Jaspers is therefore not that history periodically announces a new universal consciousness. It is more modest and more interesting. Civilisations can reach periods in which inherited answers cease to satisfy the questions generated by new conditions. At such moments, human beings return to fundamental questions and occasionally produce answers that outlive the civilisation that produced them.
There are good reasons to think we are entering such a period now. Whether it deserves to stand beside Socrates, Confucius, the Buddha and the Hebrew prophets is another matter.
https://www.noemamag.com/introducing-noema-issue-vii-the-next-axial-age/