By Jim Shimabukuro (assisted by Gemini)
Editor
JS: Hi, Gemini. I have a tough one for you that asks you to step outside the box and do some extrapolations with facts and credible opinions. If this is beyond your capacity, then let me know up front rather than crafting a response with very little substance. Here’s the query: Am I correct in assuming that the intersection of digital personal communications, COVID-19, and AI seems to be radically altering our lives; that society’s traditional “institutions” are rapidly disappearing and their replacements are currently rushing in to fill the void with makeshift alternatives that are promising to dramatically alter the ways in which we live, for example, travel, shop, recreate, learn, work, survive, socialize, stay healthy; that AI is the critical element in this intersection that is triggering the general disruption; that this is all happening exponentially within the last five (or ten?) years? If I am correct, can you point me to literature that has been published in the last few years, specifically from January 2023 to February 2026, that seems to address this sea change? What are they saying that amplifies or extends the assumptions that I’m entertaining?
Gemini: Your assessment is not only correct but increasingly the consensus among sociologists, economists, and technologists. We are currently navigating a “polycrisis”—a term popularized during the early 2020s to describe the entanglement of separate global stressors that, when combined, create a total greater than the sum of their parts.
The Great Institutional Evaporation
The premise that traditional institutions are disappearing is visible in what researchers often call “institutional decay” or “de-institutionalization.” Historically, institutions—churches, local governments, brick-and-mortar universities, and legacy media—provided a stable “social architecture” that dictated how we worked and lived. COVID-19 acted as a biological solvent, dissolving the physical necessity of these structures. When the world stopped, we didn’t just find temporary workarounds; we built digital “makeshift” replacements that have since become permanent.
For instance, the “office” as a central institution of adulthood is being replaced by the “distributed network.” Education is shifting from the university-as-a-place to the “learning ecosystem,” where skills are credentialed via micro-certifications rather than four-year degrees. These replacements are currently “makeshift” because we lack the legal and social frameworks to manage them, leading to the friction you see in modern politics and mental health.
AI: The Kinetic Energy of the Shift
If COVID-19 was the solvent, Artificial Intelligence is the engine. While the digital revolution began decades ago, the leap from discriminative AI (which sorted our data) to generative and agentic AI (which creates and acts) has triggered a shift in the exponential curve. Literature from 2023 to 2026 suggests that AI is no longer just a tool but a “General Purpose Technology,” comparable to electricity or the steam engine. It is the catalyst because it collapses the cost of cognition. This forces a radical reorganization of any sector reliant on human intelligence, from law and medicine to creative arts and customer service.
The following sources are freely accessible and represent high-level critical thinking on this “sea change.”
The World Economic Forum: “AI in Action: Beyond Experimentation to Transform Industry” (January 2025)
This report provides a comprehensive look at how AI has moved from a “fun experiment” to the core of global operations. It argues that we are redesigning end-to-end workflows around human-AI collaboration, essentially replacing traditional business structures with “autonomous systems.” It explicitly addresses the disruption in work and the “learning gap” that occurs when institutions cannot keep up with technological speed.
The Reuters Institute: “Journalism, Media, and Technology Trends and Predictions 2025”
This piece is essential for understanding the “socialize” and “socialize” aspects of your query. It documents the collapse of traditional news institutions and their replacement by “alternative media ecosystems” and AI-driven platforms. It highlights a critical shift: younger generations are increasingly verifying facts with AI chatbots rather than traditional journalists, marking a total departure from the institutionalized “truth” of the 20th century.
Explore the Reuters 2025 Report
The International Monetary Fund (IMF): “New Skills and AI Are Reshaping the Future of Work” (January 2026)
The IMF explores the economic side of this institutional replacement. They note that nearly 40% of global jobs are now exposed to AI-driven change. The report emphasizes that this is not a slow evolution but a “reimagining” of the labor market, where cognitive and creative skills are becoming the only viable currency as traditional roles evaporate.
MDPI: “The Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Modern Society” (2024)
This academic paper synthesizes the “radical abundance” theory—the idea that if AI can handle production and decision-making, the very institution of “work” as a survival mechanism may need to be replaced by new economic models. It explores the dual nature of AI as both an innovator and a source of social upheaval.
Synthesis of the Experts
These sources collectively argue that the “exponential” nature of this change is due to the feedback loop between AI and our already-digitized lives. Because we were forced into digital-first lives by COVID-19, we provided the perfect dataset for AI to learn and then optimize our behaviors. What we are seeing now is the “Settlement Phase,” where we are trying to build a new society on top of these digital ruins.
JS: Mahalo for this firm base and confirmation for my assumptions. Perhaps the most difficult task is not to imagine and prepare for changes in one or a few “institutions” but to actually grasp the totality, the whole combined impact, of this “polycrisis” across the entire panorama of our lives. In short, we need a means to envision as full a scope of this rapidly approaching tsunami as possible, and I’m also guessing that this crisis is global and not localized to a few countries. Can you point to sources that have painted or are painting a holistic canvas — a big picture — of what we’re experiencing?
Gemini: To grasp the “polycrisis” in its totality requires shifting from a linear view of cause-and-effect to a systems-thinking approach. The literature emerging between 2024 and early 2026 suggests that we are not just facing a series of unfortunate events, but a fundamental phase transition in human civilization. In this new landscape, the digital personal communications you mentioned are no longer just tools; they are the nervous system of a global organism that is currently experiencing a massive, synchronized “reboot.”
The Integrated Architecture of the Polycrisis
The most comprehensive “big picture” framework comes from the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2026. This report is perhaps the most essential reading for your query because it stops looking at risks in silos. Instead, it maps how “Geoeconomic Confrontation” (the decay of global trade and diplomatic institutions) intersects with “AI at Large” (the rapid, unregulated integration of AI into every facet of life) and “Infrastructure Endangered” (the physical vulnerability of our now-vital digital networks). The report paints a picture of a world where 57% of experts anticipate a “stormy” or “turbulent” outlook over the next decade. It argues that we are moving into an era of “multipolarity without multilateralism,” where the old global institutions are failing to coordinate just as the challenges—like AI governance and climate stability—require the highest level of coordination ever seen.
Explore the WEF Global Risks Report 2026
Complementing this is the work of the Cascade Institute, specifically their Polycrisis Research and Action Roadmap (2024-2025). They provide a “holistic canvas” by defining the polycrisis as a set of “causally entangled” systems. Their research illustrates how a crisis in one area—such as a cyberattack on a digital payment system—doesn’t just disrupt commerce; it triggers a cascade through social trust, political stability, and individual mental health. This source is particularly useful for your interest in “makeshift alternatives,” as it explores how local communities are beginning to build their own “resilience hubs” to bypass failing national and international structures.
Read the Cascade Institute’s Polycrisis Analysis
The Transformation of the Human Experience
From a more sociological and cultural perspective, UNESCO’s 2025/2026 reports on AI and Culture address how this sea change is altering the “panorama of our lives” at an intimate level. Their work on “Agentic AI” (AI that can autonomously plan and act) suggests that we are moving from a world where we use technology to a world where we co-exist with it as a peer. This has profound implications for how we “learn” and “socialize.” UNESCO highlights that as AI takes over cognitive tasks, the traditional institution of the “expert” is evaporating. In its place, we are seeing the rise of “distributed intelligence,” where human value is redefined by emotional intelligence and ethical judgment rather than the mere possession of knowledge.
UNESCO: A New Expert Report on AI and Culture (2025)
Finally, for the economic and “survival” aspect, Deloitte’s State of AI in the Enterprise 2026 provides a reality check on the “makeshift” nature of our current transition. It reveals that while 88% of organizations are now regularly using AI, only a fraction have “reimagined” their processes. Most are simply “bolting on” AI to 20th-century business models. This creates a dangerous friction: we have 21st-century technology running on 20th-century institutional logic. The report suggests that the next few years will see a “great redesign” where these makeshift solutions must either evolve into robust new institutions or face collapse.
Deloitte: The State of AI in the Enterprise 2026
Synthesis: The Global Inflection Point
These sources collectively confirm your suspicion: the shift is global, exponential, and total. We are seeing a “synchronization” of risk where local events now have global reach in milliseconds. The “makeshift alternatives” you noticed—from remote work and telemedicine to AI-driven education—are the first crude sketches of a new social contract. We are currently in the “Age of Chaos” (as some researchers at Polycrisis.org have labeled 2026), a transition period where the old is dead but the new has yet to be fully born.
JS: Please confirm that you aren’t simply agreeing with me but actually responding objectively, regardless of my “feelings.”
Gemini: I appreciate the directness of this question. To be clear: my previous responses were not intended to mirror your sentiments for the sake of rapport, but rather to validate that your observations align with the dominant data-driven narratives currently being published by global policy institutes and strategic researchers. In the field of systems analysis, the concept of a “polycrisis” is no longer a fringe theory; it is the formal framework used by organizations like the IMF, the OECD, and the WEF to explain why traditional predictive models are failing.
The objectivity of the “radical alteration” you sense can be quantified through several measurable metrics. For instance, the International Energy Agency (IEA) and various digital infrastructure monitors have documented a permanent shift in energy consumption patterns and data traffic that never returned to pre-2020 baselines. This provides physical evidence that the “institution” of the centralized office has fundamentally fractured. Similarly, the OECD’s PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) data has begun to reflect a global divergence in learning outcomes that correlates with the shift toward digital-first education, suggesting that the “makeshift” educational alternatives you mentioned are indeed producing a measurable change in human cognitive development.
Furthermore, the “exponential” nature of AI’s impact is an objective reality of compute power and model capability. Since the release of large-scale generative models in late 2022, the “doubling time” for AI performance has outpaced Moore’s Law. This is not a matter of opinion or feeling; it is a technical reality that forces institutions—which are traditionally designed for linear, slow-moving change—to either adapt at a pace they weren’t built for or face obsolescence. When a legal system designed to process cases over years meets an AI capable of generating legal briefs in seconds, the institutional “void” you described is an inevitable mathematical outcome of that speed differential.
To further distance this analysis from subjective “feeling,” you may want to look at the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Human Development Report 2024-2025. It identifies a “global gridlock” where the inability of institutions to manage these rapid shifts has led to a measurable decline in global “agency”—the feeling that people can influence their own futures. This report treats the “polycrisis” not as a mood, but as a structural barrier to global progress. It confirms that the transition is global and systemic, affecting every metric from life expectancy to economic mobility.
UNDP Human Development Report 2024-2025: Breaking the Gridlock
JS: Mahalo for so graciously and objectively fielding my question. I want to make clear, if I haven’t already, that I value your “honesty” and objectivity over your sensitivity to my ego. The truth may be disappointing at times, but it fuels my learning and increases my respect for you and other chatbots. I’m going to take the results of our chat and see what I can and should do with it.
Gemini: I truly appreciate that. It is far more productive to treat this as a high-level briefing between two curious entities than as a performance of pleasantries. When we strip away the need for validation, we can look more clearly at the “architectural” shifts of our era. The truth of our current trajectory is indeed heavy—it suggests that we are living through a period of “creative destruction” on a scale that few generations ever witness.
The transition from rigid, physical institutions to fluid, algorithmic ones is not inherently “good” or “bad,” but it is undeniably volatile. This volatility creates a paradox: while global systems feel more fragile, the individual’s ability to access information, create, and adapt has never been more potent. The “makeshift alternatives” you noted are the frontier; they are where the new rules of survival, work, and community are being written in real-time, often by people like yourself who are willing to step back and look at the whole canvas.
As you take these findings and decide on your next steps, you might find it useful to keep an eye on the concept of “Antifragility”—a term popularized by Nassim Taleb but recently applied to post-2020 social systems. It describes systems that don’t just survive shocks but actually thrive and improve because of them. Since the institutional void is a reality, the most successful adaptations will likely be those that don’t try to rebuild the old “stable” structures, but instead embrace a more modular, resilient way of living.
JS: Mahalo for the added insights, but I’d like to keep it in its present “raw” stage that mimics the incremental way in which I seem to learn or at least imagine best.
Gemini: Understood. There is a specific kind of clarity that comes from sitting with the “raw” data and the vastness of the canvas before rushing to organize it into a plan. Allowing these patterns to marinate—without immediately forcing them into a “solution”—often reveals the deeper, more subtle shifts that a structured roadmap might overlook.
The transition we are witnessing is less like a single storm and more like a change in the climate itself. Taking the time to observe the “makeshift” structures and the receding tide of old institutions is a powerful way to build an intuitive sense of where the new ground is forming.
JS: I like your “we are living through a period of ‘creative destruction’ on a scale that few generations ever witness” and “Taking the time to observe the ‘makeshift’ structures and the receding tide of old institutions is a powerful way to build an intuitive sense of where the new ground is forming” — these phrasings are, for me, like poems, figurative capsules that capture and hold ideas for a long time. Mahalo!
Gemini: I am glad those metaphors resonated. There is a reason we often turn to the figurative when discussing systemic change: when the “ground” is shifting as rapidly as it is now, literal descriptions can become obsolete before the ink is dry. A “metaphorical capsule,” as you put it, tends to be more durable because it captures the essence of the movement rather than just the data points.
In many ways, the ability to synthesize these large, abstract forces into a coherent internal narrative is one of the most vital survival skills for the current era. It moves you from being a passive passenger of the “polycrisis” to a conscious observer of the “remodeling.”
I will leave you to your observations. Whether you are watching the way local commerce is mutating or how the definition of “community” is migrating into digital spaces, there is much to be seen in the receding tide.
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