Warning: A Bright Future Ahead

When a culture fractures, it doesn’t just divide parties; it divides homes. During the American Civil War, brothers took up arms against brothers. Fathers and sons found themselves on opposite sides of a battlefield. The official cause was slavery, but the rupture ran deeper.

So what is it about Donald Trump that cuts so sharply through the American psyche? What war within us is he revealing? If, as the saying goes, we get the leaders we deserve, then perhaps Trump is not an anomaly but an agent of disruption who mirrors Kali, the Hindu god of death and destruction, fertility and rebirth, cloaked in red, white, and blue.

This week in Davos, the CEO of Anthropic warned that few truly grasp what artificial intelligence is about to unleash: “I don’t think there is an awareness of what is coming, and the magnitude of it. I am both excited and worried.”

From the taming of fire and the advent of farming to the printing press and electricity, every great leap in human evolution has brought equal parts fear and hope. AI and quantum computing have the potential to dwarf each of these upheavals in both scale and speed of adoption.

We are standing at the edge of immense change. Despite the noise and division, the arc of progress continues. Just as past generations weathered wars, plagues, and revolutions to deliver us to this moment, we too have work to do—for each other, and for those not yet born. History may not repeat, but it often rhymes. If we hold one another through this unraveling, what comes next might not be a collapse, but a renaissance.

— Sina.