Three technology curves bent at the same time between 2022 and 2025: artificial intelligence, clean energy, and biological engineering. That convergence has no precedent. The printing press did not arrive alongside steam power. The industrial revolution did not coincide with nuclear power and the internet. This time, three unrelated exponential curves hit their inflection point in the same three years.
Three Curves Bent at Once
AI became a utility in November 2022
ChatGPT launched in November 2022, running on GPT-3.5. Other large language models existed before it. None of them were something an ordinary person could open in a browser and get a useful answer from within seconds.
Before that launch, AI was a research topic discussed at conferences. After it, AI became something anyone could use to write an email, debug a script, or draft a plan.
Mechanical engines amplified human muscle two centuries ago, and language models amplify human cognition now. That shift started in November 2022, and it has not slowed down since.
Solar broke the commodity rule
Oil has to be found and extracted before a single barrel ships. Every barrel costs about the same as the last one. Oil is a commodity, and commodities do not get cheaper with practice.
Solar panels are manufactured technology, not a raw commodity, so they follow a different rule. Every time production doubles, cost drops by about 20 percent. That rule has held for decades. Solar is now the cheapest source of energy in human history, and it has not stopped getting cheaper. Battery storage follows the same curve. Solid-state batteries extend it further.
Oil, gas, and coal stay scarce because the earth holds a fixed amount of each. Solar panels and batteries do not work that way. Build more of them, and the price per unit keeps dropping.
The genome went from $3 billion to $100
The first human genome was sequenced in 2003. It cost $3 billion and took fifteen years.
Sequencing a genome costs about $100 today. It will soon cost $50. CRISPR emerged about fifteen years ago and now lets a lab edit the genome of any living thing cheaply and precisely. Cultivated meat, grown from a single cell in a vat, is real meat that required no animal.
Biology went from something we could only observe to something we can design. The cost of that design work keeps falling on the same curve as solar panels and AI compute.
The Institutions Built for Scarcity
These three technologies are the foundation for a different civilization, not an upgraded version of the current one. We are still running the same institutions that predate all three:
Financial capitalism, designed for scarcity, not abundance
Representative democracy, designed for slow-moving agrarian societies
Nation-states, designed before we could coordinate ten billion people digitally
The technology moved. The institutions did not.
Tony Seba and James Arbib at RethinkX argue that institutions lag technology in this short episode.
What Breaks First
The current economic system works well if you are in the top 10 percent. It works even better in the top 1 percent. It does not work for the other 80 percent.
Financial capitalism sets prices by scarcity. Energy, intelligence, and biological engineering are all getting cheaper by design now, not by luck. Once the things a market allocates stop being scarce, the pricing mechanism under that market breaks down.
Representative democracy was built for a world where information traveled by horse. Vote counting took weeks. That made sense in 1789. Digital coordination is real-time today, and citizens still vote once every four years on decisions that move daily.
Nation-states have the same problem at a larger scale. They were built for a world that communicated in weeks. Now they have to coordinate ten billion people sharing one finite planet.
Capitalism Has to Reprice Abundance
The most urgent rebuild is economic. If scarcity pricing stops working, capitalism will still exist. It just has to price abundance instead of scarcity, and nobody has fully built that discipline yet.
Democracy and nation-states need their own rebuild too. The mechanism is less obvious for either one than it is for pricing. AI, clean energy, and bioengineering already work today. The work still ahead is building institutions that can use what they produce.
Almost Four Years Into the Convergence
This convergence started almost four years ago, in November 2022, and it is still running. The work of redesigning capitalism, democracy, and nation-states around it has barely started.
Will that redesign happen on purpose, or by default? That question decides what the next decade actually builds.
Related reading: How AI Video Generation Actually Works and Cyborg Ethics: Engineering the Soul of a Machine.
The simultaneous curve crossings are the key insight. Scarcity-era systems cannot survive abundance-era tools.
Here's the TL;DR version of this:
• Multiple exponential technologies crossed viability at the same time.
• This has not happened in any previous industrial shift.
• Institutions are still designed for scarcity economics.
• AI, energy, and biology are manufacturing abundance.
• Systems will either be rebuilt intentionally or fail reactively.