Joshua Cooper Ramo

This book is for those who will have to build and manage machines that are smarter than humans, for those who will create a new network, and for all of us who want to turn the energies of a disruptive age to constructing an order that feels secure and just.

Our aim is to help others escape from the chaos too, to improve their lives as a condition of our own happiness. This drive to make something from wildness is the point of politics, of philosophy, and of networks and art.

It means that the battlefields of power, which for most of human history have been over the control of space and territory, will now become—rather incredibly— about the control of time.

That such predictions are often wrong—and that we’re so often surprised by events in economics or politics—is a reminder that complex systems like economies or elections are filled with mechanisms that upset the hopes of overconfident planners. Too often we look at some puzzle, say Iraqi politics or income inequality, and think it is merely ‘complicated.’ We should know better.

Are you the gatekeeper? Or the gatekept?

Fluency in any second language in the future will be an arcane specialty. Better to teach the kids how to build an artificial intelligence program, or to debate the moral reasoning of Confucius and Socrates, than how to order dinner in another language.

The Seventh Sense—which is a feeling of how networks work that is joined to a sense of history and politics and philosophy—has let us understand the origins of this dynamic. It has shown us that disruption is not a sign of chaos or unpredictable surprise, even if it looks that way from the headlines. Rather, it marks a huge construction project.