Welcome to This Week’s Edition of the Lo Down!

This week, I really wanted to explore the concept of the Age of Instability, a concept I coined last week.

There are parallels to a book I’m writing about education in the age of AI, as surely the education sector still exists in this new Age of Instability. But I wanted to cover what exactly are the dynamics that got us here, and what those dynamics mean in this new Age.

Let’s dive in. 🚀

🫨 The Age of Instability

I want to discuss a little bit more about what I meant last week about the age of instability.

First - how did we get here? 

There are two waves - one is the geopolitical wave and the other is the technological wave. Let’s start with the latter first.

Technology, for better or for worse, is here to stay. But it’s gone through waves of change.

Let’s talk this through via the lens of my own personal perspective.

There was a time when I wholeheartedly embraced technology. Technology was the promise of globalisation. Of democracy. Of idealism. Of doing good.

Then it grew up. It became less about doing good, but shareholder profits.

Just like a human being growing up, it emerged from the teenage years to become an early adult wanting to make it up the career ladder.

It became ugly. You couldn’t quite put your finger on it, but you could smell it.

Google dropped its “do no evil” slogan. It became less about the hipsters and experimentation. Tech became way more mainstream.

Tech jumped out of the raw hands of the hippies and into the well-manicured fingers of the bankers. From soulful to now soulless.

This was the time I rejected it. I cancelled my Twitter account, thinking that it was starting to get pointless, and was considering doing the same with other social media accounts. The quality of conversations had degraded so much. People were putting out comments for comments’ sake.

People all discovered they had a voice online. And damnit, they’ll exercise it.

And then AI came.

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