The Maelstrom used to be the end of the world. Edgar Allan Poe wrote about it. Jules Verne wrote about it. Jack Sparrow danced through it. I spent every summer of my childhood on this bare island until I was fifteen, Værøy, the Weather Island, separated from the mainland of Lofoten by Moskenesstraumen, the mythological current once thought to mark the world’s edge. Eight years ago I started coming back. I have been silently working on ‘The Maelstrom’ ever since.

Over the weekend I watched a fireside chat on a stage at a venture capital firm in San Francisco, where Nobel laureate and DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis said something that almost no one really picked up on. He was talking about the future of AI. The conversation had moved from neuroscience to AlphaFold to WeatherNext 2, the simulator his lab has built for weather, and on to their breakthrough work in biology.

New Work has not failed—but it has been disenchanted. What began as a promise of freedom and self-determination now leads, in many organizations, less to orientation and more to uncertainty. Technological systems, data-driven decisions, and accelerated markets are shifting the internal logic of organizations—often faster than their interpretive frameworks can keep up.

The past fifty years reveal a striking paradox. Economic output has grown enormously. But so has the pressure on our planet. CO₂ emissions increased. Biodiversity declined. Resource extraction intensified. The debate therefore shifted. The old question was: Will growth eventually stop? The new question became: Can growth be decoupled from environmental destruction? But perhaps even this question is too small. Because another possibility is emerging: What if growth itself becomes part of the solution?

The human being is not merely a system that processes information about the world. It is a being to whom the world appears. Perhaps this is precisely where the difference between intelligence and subjectivity lies. Intelligence describes what a system can calculate about the world. Subjectivity describes that there is a perspective from which the world can be experienced in the first place. The decisive question of our time may therefore not be whether machines will learn to think. But whether they will ever have a world. For perhaps the human being is not primarily the creature that thinks. But the creature to whom the world appears. Perhaps our being does not begin with a thought.

The debate about prompts is too small. The debate about creativity and training data is too small. The real provocation is this: What happens when millions of networked, non-biological agents explore the physical world, learn faster than we do, share knowledge instantly, and iterate without fatigue?

For a long time, I believed this emptiness was a flaw. A crack. A sign that something was missing. Filling time had become the imperative of our age: to function, to optimize, to react. A fulfilled life seemed to be the result of constant activity—until I realized I had mistaken activity for aliveness. I confused what was visible on the outside with who I am. I mistook effect for essence.

Reality is not something given. It comes into being. Through conversations, images, stories, rules—through what we collectively accept, often without saying so. What we call “real” has always been the result of shared human effort.

Music lives from the fact that more is present than what sounds in the moment. What we hear carries memory within it and announces what is to come. The same is true of time.

We usually treat the future as a point ahead of us, as a moment that has yet to be reached. In this view, the future keeps moving forward. It remains distant.

This morning, I am on my way to Davos for the annual World Economic Forum. This year’s guiding theme is “A Spirit of Dialogue”—an attempt to open a shared space for thinking about the future amid fragmented markets, geopolitical power shifts, societal upheavals, and exponential technologies.