Everything we’ve ever known has been shaped by industrialization.
It’s the water we swim in.
It taught us how to work,
where to live,
and what to learn.
It made specialists of us all,
and rewarded us for keeping our heads down.
Now the water is changing.
We were born in the Industrial Age.
But we will die (or not) in the Age of Intelligence.
A high IQ used to be scarce.
Now it’s a priced commodity, like energy or corn.
Okay.
So now what?
What is valuable now?
Not information. That’s free.
Not intelligence, either. It’s built into everything.
AI can, or soon will, take on all the doing.
So what’s left for us?
In the end, asking the right questions,
and checking the answers.
So where does value come from now?
I’d argue it’s
coherence.
Coherence is how well the parts of something fit,
with each other
and with the whole.
You can feel it in
a great song,
a healthy body,
a team that trusts itself.
Wisdom is the ability to see coherence:
to see what fits, in context, over time.
Intelligence answers questions.
Wisdom knows which matter.
A wise mind is like a clean palate, free of obscuration.
So good taste knows when something is off,
and precisely why.
That’s what lets us ask the right questions,
and tell a good answer from a bad one.
As intelligence becomes abundant,
wisdom will become the scarcest asset there is,
and the thing that sets people, and whole societies, apart.
I’ve spent most of my life cultivating it.
For a long time, that was an odd thing to do.
There has never been an economic reason to put wisdom first.
Now there is.
As the labor economy gives way,
wisdom becomes the work.
So I build tools that help people grow their own.
It shouldn’t take a lifetime.
The company is Coherence.
It builds tools for wisdom, and platforms like Mindplex for coherence at every scale.