From the southern summer vacation – or, as one says today, a workation, though for me above all a moment of thinking-time – I reflect on the creation of an Artificial Human Intelligence (AHI): a remaking of the human being, in which we ourselves take over evolution. At the same time, I contemplate the construction of a conscious machine, with its own agency and qualia – the experience of what it feels like to be something. In doing so, I lose myself in paradoxes of the singularity. Today, poetically, philosophically, aphoristically – on love and hatred.

In a turbo-trend society, where viral sensations whip us through life like a whirlwind, even the noblest goal—longevity—becomes a short-term illusion. As I was hunting Labubu dolls with my daughter last Saturday—these cute monster figures that have become a global collecting frenzy in 2025 and sell out in seconds—I had to reflect once again on our optimization society, which I described in my book “The Infected Thinking” in 2020. And just a few Saturdays ago, I sat with Bryan Johnson in Stockholm in the evening and talked exactly about that topic: Optimization through longevity hacks for a life up to 120 and his “Don’t Die” initiative.

The average life span of an S&P 500 company has plunged from 61 years in 1958 to under 18 years today, and forecasts indicate that 75 percent of today’s companies could vanish by 2027. This dramatic trend is only one sign of a fundamental transformation in how organizations function.

In an era of exponential technological progress—where artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, biotechnology and quantum computing increasingly outperform human efficiency—the old HR mantra “People are our greatest asset” is outdated. Yet it is precisely the “H” in HR—the element of what it means to be a Mensch (human) in future—that becomes the pivotal driver of business success.

For years now, my co-author and friend Dr. Florian Neukart and I have been dancing at the intersection of philosophy and science – we call it Sci-Phi. As an Austrian he held strongly on to the foundation of modern physics that was laid out on a theoretical level one hundred years ago by fellow Austrian Erwin Schrödinger and others. The problem for Florian – and now also for me – is that we are now moving beyond the theoretical level and looking at the practical implications through the emergence of computation unlike anything seen in the history of physics and our species. 

My voice is not lost. I still shape the flow between the lines, lending drama and character through an em-dash, a guillemet. Yet the machine dances along—precise, tireless, a mirror that both reflects and distorts me. In this digital age, we do not fight for life or death, but for the question of how alive our life still is—for that perception shaped by an em-dash or an individually placed guillemet. If this perception fades in a binary world, our light goes out. Then they come: the philosophical zombies—all-knowing, immortal, yet too dead to be alive and too alive to be dead. A captivity in undeadness.

The exponential pace of today’s world is rendering traditional management obsolete. Management today is technology, not a human skill. What we need now is Anticipatory Leadership—the capacity to sense-and-shape unfolding futures instead of reacting to them after the fact.

The average S&P 500 company’s lifespan has collapsed from 61 years in 1958 to under 18 today, and forecasts warn that 75 percent may vanish by 2027. Over two decades of studying AI, exponential technologies, and business transformation, I have watched disruptive giants thrive while legacy firms scramble to survive.

From these lessons I propose the Triangular Alchemy of Modern Business—a conceptual model with three pillars—Forge, Efficiency, and Investment—for how future organizations must be (re)built.

Triangular Alchemy fuels what I call the Becoming Organization, a dynamic enterprise that rejects finite goals in favor of iterative, adaptive ambitions, thriving in an infinite game of relentless change. Embracing uncertainty, it treats crises as catalysts for creation, fostering a culture of exploration and long-term thinking.

Rooted in adaptive success, Triangular Alchemy empowers leaders to build resilient, growth-driven organizations through dynamic tension and, above all, Anticipatory Leadership.

Why bother with meals anymore? The reality is sobering: Our soils are exhausted—the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reports that 33% of the world’s arable land is degraded. Each year, erosion strips away another 24 billion tons of fertile topsoil. Our food is nutrient-poor—vitamins and minerals have plummeted over decades. An apple isn’t a beacon of health anymore; it’s a relic of a lost world. A study by U.S. agricultural researcher Donald R. Davis found that between 1950 and 1999, Vitamin C in common fruits and vegetables dropped by up to 30%, calcium by 27%, iron by 37%. Industrial agriculture churns out calories in bulk—but quality? Barely a whisper. Yet, per the FAO, over 3 billion people suffer from malnutrition—not for lack of calories, but for lack of access to nutrient-rich diets.

We measure progress in cold metrics: context windows ballooning to millions of tokens, benchmarks in math and coding shattered like glass, reasoning sharpened to a blade’s edge. Yet this is no longer about organizing chaos or hoarding knowledge—it’s about transcending both to shape a technological society of understanding. We’ve built machines that will now reason beyond us, tools so potent they mock our romantic hope to retain something worth reasoning about. Consciousness in these entities? Irrelevant. Their power eclipses every artifact of human history, and we stand, mouths agape, at the precipice of our own obsolescence as we welcome the homo obsoletus. 

We live in a time of truncated messages. Tweets replace debate, opinions drown out knowledge, and our society operates less in a mode of reflection than one of reaction. The mere fact that J.D. Vance attended the Munich Security Conference, and that Alice Weidel—yes, I have to pause in 2025 to even say this—represents the second-strongest political party in the so-called “land of poets and thinkers” underscores this reactive era.

OpenEuroLLM – this is the name of Europe’s new vision in the digital race. Under the banners of “AI Made in Europe” and “Shaping Europe’s Digital Future,” 20 leading European entities—including renowned universities, research institutions, companies, and European high-performance computing initiatives (EuroHPC) —are working together to catch up. However, the planned budget of 58 million dollars seems rather modest, especially considering the United States recently invested 56 billion US dollars in GenAI projects. The name “OpenEuroLLM” also doesn’t sound quite as impactful as Lama, Groc, Claude, or their well-known friend GPT.