For the past few years, I have had to ask myself a question I never asked before in my life: What should we call the era we’re living in today?
I was born into the “Cold War” era, and most of my career as a columnist was in the “Post-Cold War.” The latter era — those decades since 1989 characterized by American unipolar dominance — ended in the 2020s with the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, followed by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which exploded Europe’s Cold War and post-Cold War security architecture, followed by China’s emergence as a true peer economic and military rival to the U.S.
My initial thought was that we should call this new epoch the “Post-Post-Cold War,” but that made no sense. No, we have arrived at a moment that is much more than the aftermath of a largely bipolar superpower rivalry born in the mid- to late 1940s. It’s the birth of something novel and highly complex to which we all must adapt, and quickly — but what to call it?
Many climate scientists call our current epoch the “Anthropocene” — the first human-driven climate era. Many technologists call it the “Information Age” or now the “Artificial Intelligence Age.” Some strategists prefer to call it “the Return of Geopolitics” or, as historian Robert Kagan put it, “the Jungle Grows Back.”
But none of these labels captures the full fusion taking place between accelerating climate change and rapid transformations in technology, biology, cognition, connectivity, material science, geopolitics and geoeconomics. They have set off an explosion of all sorts of things combining with all sorts of other things — so much so that everywhere you turn these days binary systems seem be giving way to poly ones. AI is hurtling toward “polymathic artificial general intelligence,” climate change is cascading into “poly-crisis,” geopolitics is evolving into “polycentric” and “polyamorous” alignments, once-binary trade is dispersing into “poly-economic” supply webs, and our societies are diversifying into ever more “polymorphic” mosaics.
As a foreign affairs columnist, I now have to track the impact and interactions of not only superpowers, but also super-intelligent machines, super-empowered individuals taking advantage of technology to extend their reach and super-global corporations, as well as super-storms and super-failing states, like Libya and Sudan.
I was musing about all this one day with Craig Mundie, the former head of research and strategy at Microsoft. I told him that in nearly every domain I was writing about lately, the old binary left-right systems were giving way to multiple interconnected ones, and, in the process, shattering the coherence of both the Cold War and post-Cold War paradigms.
At one point Mundie said to me, “I know what you should call this new era: the Polycene.”
It was a neologism — a word he just made up and not in the dictionary. Admittedly wonky, it is derived from the Greek “poly,” meaning “many.” But it immediately struck me as the right name for this new epoch, where — thanks to smartphones, computers and ubiquitous connectivity — every person and every machine increasingly has a voice to be heard and a lever to impact one another, and the planet, at a previously unimaginable speed and scale.
So, welcome to the Polycene. It’s been an interesting ride getting here.
Better than any human
My journey through the phase changes that led me to Polycene began in the summer of 2024, two years after ChatGPT was first released, when I sat down with Mundie for a series of tutorials on AI. I have been very fortunate over the years to have developed a network of experts on different subjects, whom I call tutors. They have become both cherished teachers and friends, and Mundie, originally a supercomputer designer, has been my go-to person on computing since 2004.
One of the first things he explained to me was that the holy grail of the AI revolution was creating a machine capable of “polymathic artificial general intelligence.” This would be a machine that was able to master physics, chemistry, biology, computer science, philosophy, Mozart, Shakespeare and baseball better than any human could, and then reason across all of those disciplines at a high dimensional level, higher than a human ever could, to produce breakthrough insights that no human ever could.
While some skeptics believe that we will never be able to build a machine with truly polymathic AGI, many others, including Mundie, believe it is a matter of when, not if.
This is a remarkable phase change in cognition that we are going through: We are moving from programmable computing — where a computer could only ever reflect the insight and intelligence of the human who programmed it — toward polymathic AGI. That is where you basically describe the outcome you want, and the AI melds insight, creativity and broad knowledge to figure out the rest. We are shifting the boundary of cognition, Mundie argues, from what humans can imagine and program to what computers can discover, imagine and design on their own. It is the mother of all computing phase changes — and a species-level turning point.
The microchip evolution
All of this was made possible by microchips evolving from binary to poly. In the binary era, chips processed data serially — toggling between 0s and 1s to execute one instruction after another. In the poly era, chips can compute in parallel — with thousands of smaller tasks processed at once, each aware of and interacting with the others.
The big advance in parallel processing in the early 2000s is what made today’s AI possible. It enabled computers to ingest huge amounts of data into their “brains” — their neural networks — and train themselves using billions of tiny settings, called parameters. As an AI system learns, it keeps adjusting these settings — like turning little dials — so it can recognize patterns, weigh alternatives and iteratively get smarter over time.
I have been tracking this change in computing for years from one of my favorite vantage points. When I want to understand how power is shifting in the world, my first call is rarely to the Pentagon or the State Department. Instead, I visit Applied Materials in Silicon Valley. Applied makes the precision machines and materials that allow companies like Nvidia, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., Intel and Samsung to manufacture the latest generations of microchips. So very often Applied can see before anyone else which companies and countries are pushing the technological frontier and which are lagging.
My most recent tutors there have been CEO Gary Dickerson and the chief of staff, Tristan Holtam, who for years have been showing me how our ability to generate polymathic AI has been enhanced by the creation of more polymorphic chips.
“We’ve gone from monolithic designs to disaggregated ones — breaking up the chip into ‘chiplets,’ each with its own specialized role and then recombining them into one integrated system,” Holtam explained. This, he added, “allows a single ‘system in a package’ to contain many different functions — logic, memory, communications, graphics — coexisting and cooptimizing together,” resulting in much more computing capability with less energy consumption.
And when designers ran out of room to add more features in two dimensions, they moved into three. Chips are now built vertically, stacking up many layers of circuitry — tiny parking ramps of transistors and memory cells stitched together by miles of microscopic or even nanoscopic wiring. Each new layer sharply increases the chip’s capacity for learning, predicting and decision-making.
Put it all together and you have the silicon foundation for the Polycene — multiple intelligences, seamlessly networked, co-improving and co-evolving in real time.
From climate change to polycrisis
About a week after the AI tutorial in 2024 with Mundie, I got an email from my favorite environmental tutor, Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and one of the world’s premier earth system scientists. Rockström said that he and his colleague Thomas Homer-Dixon, the executive director of the Cascade Institute at Royal Roads University in British Columbia, were convening a seminar in New York for climate week and could I help moderate?
I told him, “I’d be happy to — but what’s it about?”
“It’s about polycrisis,” Rockström said.
I thought: “That’s interesting. My AI tutor is talking about ‘polymathic artificial general intelligence,’ my microchip tutors have been talking about poly chips — and now my environmental tutor is talking about ‘polycrisis.’ What’s up with all the polys?”
The term “polycrisis” has been around for decades but has been recently popularized by Columbia University historian Adam Tooze to highlight how one crisis, like COVID or the Ukraine war, can increasingly trigger multiple crises across the globe.
Rockström and Homer-Dixon have been mining the same concept, but with a particular focus on how cascading environmental crises were breaching what Rockström calls our “planetary boundaries.” These are interconnected life-support systems — like the stability of our climate and the health of our oceans, forests and soils — whose integrity we need to maintain to keep humanity safe and the natural world resilient.
For decades, when we spoke about climate change, the narrative was simple and rather binary: more warming bad, less warming good.
The thinking about climate change, though, has undergone a phase change of its own. In Rockström’s view, climate change becomes the spark that ignites cascades of interlocking crises. Together, they put the whole Earth in a state of polycrisis — where self-reinforcing events like the melting of the polar ice caps and the destruction of the Amazon, two giant regulators of the Earth’s temperature, propel us toward higher and higher temperatures, even without human fossil-fuel burning. This triggers more droughts, floods, wildfires, crop failures and sea-level rise, which in turn unleash economic shocks, mass migration, the collapse of fragile states and the breakdown of trust worldwide.
Two factors are propelling us in this direction, Rockström and Homer-Dixon wrote in a Nov. 13, 2022, opinion essay in this newspaper: “First, the magnitude of humanity’s resource consumption and pollution output is weakening the resilience of natural systems, worsening the risks of climate heating, biodiversity decline and zoonotic viral outbreaks,” and second, “vastly greater connectivity among our economic and social systems” means that what happens in one country or community can quickly tip into others, with no regard for borders.
I reported on the mini-version of this dynamic firsthand from Syria in the years just before its civil war erupted in 2011. A once-in-a-century drought — made more intense by shifting climate patterns — wiped out crops, drove hundreds of thousands of rural Syrians off their farms and forced them into the outskirts of cities like Aleppo and Damascus. There, they collided with soaring food prices, joblessness and long-standing ethnic and sectarian grievances. Then Syrians got on their cellphones and watched the uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia, prompted in part by rising food prices. And then they blew the lid off Syria.
A geopolitical transformation
Needless to say, this combination of fracturing states and fracturing Cold War alliances is combining to make geopolitics in general more polyamorous.
In 2011, historian Walter Russell Mead observed that after the 1990s revolution that triggered the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russians had a saying that today would apply to more than a few other countries: “It’s easier to turn an aquarium into fish soup than to turn fish soup into an aquarium.”
From Europe to the Middle East to Africa to Latin America, a lot of aquariums are being turned into fish soup full of sectarian, tribal or networked, super-empowered militias. It is no accident that it took President Donald Trump so much time and energy — and arm-twisting — to herd all the different states, armies and militias into a simple ceasefire in the Gaza Strip. It could take him the rest of his time in office to herd them into peace — maybe.
At the same time, when I started in journalism in 1978, the world was largely defined by a set of binaries — East-West, Communist-Capitalist, North-South. Most countries at the time fit into one of those clubs. Today, it has become a free-for-all square dance of shifting partners. Iran is aligned with Russia against Ukraine. China is supplying technology for drones to both Russia and Ukraine. Israel is aligned with Muslim Azerbaijan versus Christian Armenia.
“The diffusion of power is not only about the U.S., Europe, China or Russia,” national security experts Robert Muggah and Mark Medish wrote on the geopolitical risk site SecDev. “Middle powers — Brazil, India, Türkiye, the Gulf states, South Africa — are practicing what diplomats now call ‘multialignment.’ They seek advantage issue by issue rather than binding themselves to one camp. India buys discounted Russian oil while courting Western investment and tech transfers. Brazil expands trade with China while floating mediation ideas with Beijing and talking climate finance with Washington and Brussels.”
Warfare today is also much less binary — your front line against mine — with much more “hybrid” attacks coming from everywhere. Because the front line has become poly.
Russian President Vladimir Putin is fighting Ukraine on the attack surface of Ukrainian territory, and at the same time, he’s fighting Western Europe using the attack surface of cyberspace, where everyone is connected but no one is in charge. On that front, Putin’s shadow warriors are believed to be behind numerous disinformation campaigns in European Union elections, unattributed drone incursions into Western European airspace and even, in August, jamming the GPS system of the plane carrying European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen while flying over Bulgaria, forcing the pilot to dig out paper maps to land safely.
From binary to polymorphic communities
When I was growing up in Minnesota in the 1950s, the social landscape was extremely binary. Generally speaking, you were either white or Black, a man or a woman, straight or gay, a Christian or a Jew. You were either at work or at home or at home or in school. My representatives in Congress were mostly liberal white Republican men in a Democratic district — not unusual in Minnesota back then. The categories were pretty rigid, and the boundaries policed by culture, law, prejudice, income and habit. Diversity certainly existed, but it was limited and rarely celebrated.
Not anymore!
Today, my hometown, St. Louis Park, once the beating heart of Minnesota Jewish culture, synagogues and delicatessens, has a 29-year-old Somali Muslim woman as mayor, Nadia Mohamed, who graduated from my high school and is part of the influx of Somalis to frigid Minnesota.
If I still lived in my old neighborhood, my representative in Washington would be Ilhan Omar, one of the first two Muslim women to serve in Congress. I am told that more than 30 languages are spoken in the elementary school near my old house — roughly 29 more than when I grew up there.
Last week, St. Paul elected a Laotian Hmong immigrant, Kaohly Her, as its first Hmong American and female mayor — after she defeated the incumbent, Melvin Carter, the city’s first Black mayor.
It’s no wonder: Global migration has roughly doubled in number since 1990. It has become so multidirectional — workers moving from South Asia to the Persian Gulf, students from Africa to China, Sudanese and Eritrean refugees to Israel, Polish workers to Britain and refugees from Syria, Venezuela and Ukraine to everywhere — that communities once defined by a single ethnicity or faith are now polyglot, polychromatic and polyreligious.
The news about those communities has also moved from binary — largely top-down news generated by mainstream newspapers, magazines and television networks — to poly: news generated side-to-side on social media and bottom up by bloggers and podcasters.
When the Trump administration recently tried to shield from view as much as possible its destruction of the White House East Wing, noted CNN’s Brian Stelter, “One of the most striking views of the demolition came from a passenger on a plane flying out of National Airport yesterday. It was reshared on X and other sites millions of times.”
Poly-economic networks
When Adam Smith laid out the foundational principles of trade in the 18th century, he imagined a relatively simple world of binary relationships: I make cheese, you make wine, and by specializing in what each of us does best, we both end up better off. That insight was revolutionary and still underpins our view (except for Trump) that trade can be a win-win proposition.
But if Smith were alive now, watching how iPhones, mRNA vaccines, electric vehicles or advanced microchips get made, he wouldn’t just update his theories — he would have to write a new book.
What’s changed? In a word: complexity. Today’s economy is no longer primarily built on bilateral trade of discrete goods between countries with clear borders and self-contained industries. Instead, Eric Beinhocker, executive director of the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School, another of my tutors, points out that we now operate more and more inside global ecosystems, what he calls dynamic, “interdependent webs” of knowledge, skills, technology and trust.
That explains why most trade today involves more than two countries. In summarizing a report it released in June, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development said global supply chains now “account for about 70% of international trade, as services, raw materials, parts and components cross borders — often multiple times.” That weaves a complex web, where products are designed in one country, sourced with components from multiple others, manufactured in still a different place, assembled in yet another country and tested in one more.
Smith famously identified the division of labor as a huge productivity booster — you can make more pins with fewer workers if you divide up the labor correctly. “That was great,” Beinhocker remarked to me in a column in February. But today, in the Polycene, “the more powerful engine is the division of knowledge.”
When knowledge and capabilities are pooled, we are able to make complex things that solve complex problems cheaper and faster than any country could do alone.
Think about the chip in your smartphone. It was imagined in California, designed using software from the U.S. and Europe, manufactured in Taiwan using Dutch lithography machines and materials science innovations from Japan and Silicon Valley, all assembled in China and delivered by a global logistics network.
I always chuckle when I recall what Don Rosenberg, a former general counsel for Qualcomm, once told me about Qualcomm’s relationship with the Chinese tech behemoth Huawei — because it perfectly sums up today’s poly-economic world: “Huawei is our customer, our licensee, our competitor, our shared standards setter, and we are suing each other!”
The world, at its best, no longer runs on the equation “my finished product for yours.” It runs on 21st-century networks of collaboration built on trust, not bullying.
How to govern in the Polycene
This kind of explosion of diverse new players is hardly without precedent in the history of our planet. While we often think of evolution as slow and incremental, the fact is that world history has been punctuated by massive bursts of new species and new designs — but this is not true only in nature, Beinhocker said to me.
Human civilization has also followed a similar pattern of big bangs, he explained, “each dramatically amplifying the complexity of human life” by expanding the number of empowered actors, connections, interactions and feedback loops in human society.
Think, Beinhocker said, “of how the shift from hunter-gatherers to settled civilizations” — with farmers and peasants and artisans and kings — “complexified life.” Think of how the printing revolution broke the monopoly on information held by religious and royal elites, and how the Industrial Revolution amplified human and machine power, enabling much more global trade and connectivity. Now we have artificially intelligent machines and robots joining the play, adding exponentially more nodes, networks and combinations of actors.
Many industrial democracies eventually concluded that the best way to govern in the industrial age was with some form of welfare state and two-party political systems based on a fixed left-right grid. I just don’t see how that works much longer in a world where most of the problems we face do not have “either/or” answers: they have “both/and” answers. Key actors must be able to occupy multiple states, and hold competing ideas in tension, at the same time.
I am a both/and person by nature. On immigration, I am for a very high wall, with a very big gate — secure borders and a welcome to both high-energy and highly skilled legal immigrants. On policing, I am for more police and better police. On economics, I am for growing the pie and redividing the pie. On education, I am for well-funded public schools but also for charters and independent schools; competition makes everyone better.
On foreign policy, I am for diplomacy but always backed by a strong military. On trade, I am for free trade with transparent rules — but also reciprocal treatment: Whatever China imposes on us, we should impose on it. On energy, I am for natural gas with carbon/methane capture, wind, solar, nuclear, geothermal, fission, fusion — any solution that can provide energy that is reliable, affordable and will diminish the odds we enter into a climate polycrisis. During the COVID pandemic, I was for balancing saving lives and saving livelihoods.
It’s not because I can’t make up my mind.
It’s because I have made up my mind — that in the Polycene, the best answers live in the synthesis, not on the edges.
But because so many traditional left-right parties have hardened into political silos — incapable of operating in multiple modes at once — they are either fracturing under the stress of reality or devolving into identity tribes bound together by shared grievances, ethnicities and economic fantasies, and therefore increasingly irrelevant to real-world problem-solving. That’s not sustainable.
The most adaptive, resilient and productive communities in the Polycene will be those that can assemble dynamic coalitions across issues — what I call complex adaptive coalitions. These bring together business, labor, government, social entrepreneurs, philanthropists, innovators, regulators and educators to solve problems through synthesis rather than by postponing them with binary mutual vetoes. That is the only way to move fast and make things.
“Our old basis of shared association does not work anymore,” observed Dov Seidman, the business philosopher and founder of the HOW Institute for Society. “But the imperatives to live together, work together, cooperate with one another in ecosystems and belong together — not turn on each other — have only intensified.”
“Interdependence is no longer our choice,” he added. “It is our condition. We will either build healthy interdependencies and rise together or suffer through unhealthy interdependencies and fall together.”
Whichever way we go, though, we’re going there together.
That’s the inescapable truth of the Polycene, even if many leaders in Washington, Beijing and Moscow still haven’t grasped it. It will be the first era in which humanity must govern, innovate, collaborate and coexist at a planetary scale in order to thrive. Only by doing so can we capture the best and cushion the worst of everything from AI to nuclear power to climate change. It will take everyone, everywhere, rowing together.
“The decisive test of our age,” Beinhocker remarked to me, “is whether we will recognize this in time.”
Thomas Friedman writes a column for the New York Times.
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