The Quickening Age of Intelligence

“Speed is the new currency of business.”

–Jack Welch

May 30, 2025 — In a world increasingly shaped not by what we understand but by what we choose to ignore, there’s a pulse quickening beneath the surface — not metaphorical but literal – disrupting the economy, the geopolitical order, and the very architecture of human labor.

It’s driven by technology. It’s hemmed in by politics.

The future, for most, is arriving like a freight train with no conductor. But people are too distracted by TikTok, student loan bills, or the price of organic eggs to notice.

We’re entering what historians will, if Sam Altman has his way, call the Intelligence Age.

More than dystopian visions of robot butlers or smart cities, this era for those of us living through it is more about the collapsing distance between upheavals, the vanishing gap between disruption and reaction.

It’s about the quickening.

The term quickening comes from the root word quick, an archaic synonym for “living.” (Think “the quick and the dead.”) The concept goes back at least to Aristotle, who believed that male fetuses take on human characteristics after 40 days in the womb, and female fetuses after about 80 days.

In medieval theology, this was when a being became truly alive. The term is older than Silicon Valley or Shenzhen.

Today, the quickening describes a societal contraction — a compression of history itself. Epochs that once spanned centuries now arrive every decade. From Agricultural to Industrial took 10,000 years. Industrial to Digital? 250. Digital to AI? Less than 40.

Ray Dalio, in Principles for Navigating Big Debt Crises and The Changing World Order, outlines how we move through cyclical patterns of rise, peak, decline, and reset. Each technological leap accelerates the arc. AI and algorithmic finance have compressed it to near-zero lag time between cause and effect. In Dalio’s terms, the most dangerous phase is always the transition — when people are least prepared.

“The biggest risk is that people are not prepared for what’s coming next.” — Ray Dalio, 2022

Peter Thiel, writing in the foreword to The Sovereign Individual, offers a different dichotomy: If AI is centralizing, crypto is decentralizing. One empowers the state, the other dissolves it.

“AI is communist. Crypto is libertarian.” — Peter Thiel

China is the world’s AI-statist proof-of-concept. From social credit systems to real-time biometric surveillance, the Chinese Communist Party has fused machine intelligence with political control. Meanwhile, the U.S. outsources algorithmic governance to firms — Palantir, OpenAI, Amazon, BlackRock.

Crypto, on the other hand, is building a shadow architecture: not just bitcoin, but DAOs, zero-knowledge rollups, decentralized compute. Strong cryptography offers sovereignty not just from governments, but from platforms.

In May 2025, the IMF released a report calling for “global coordination on AI deployment and standards,” warning of economic fragmentation. That same week, El Salvador announced its “AI mining zones” — fusing volcano-powered crypto rigs with open-source AI models in a sovereign experiment.

Markets haven’t yet decided which pole to follow. AI-linked equities like Nvidia and ASML are trading like sovereign bonds. The average P/E ratio in the sector is above 75. In classical market terms, it’s a bubble. It’s also a new regime. Value investing, as Buffett defined it, makes sense only if the old world still exists. The old Sage is hanging up his boots. His successor, Greg Abel will have to keep the faith with a new set of tools.

Labor markets can’t keep pace. In March 2025, Goldman Sachs announced 58% of its research division would be “AI-augmented” — a euphemism for halved. Lawsuits followed within weeks. At the same time, Fidelity launched a “Hybrid AI Allocation Fund” — part ETF, part DAO. The market is pricing more than companies. It’s pricing governance.

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has warned, “We’re on the verge of an intelligence explosion. The real question is how society adapts to that much power being available that quickly.” Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, echoed the concern: “AI may soon be capable of decision-making faster than institutions can respond. That introduces risks that are new not just in scale, but in kind.”

In Empire of Debt, Bill Bonner and I predicted the collapse of the nation-state under its own debt. The Achilles’ Heel of all empire. Given the same ol’,  same ol’ we’re seeing with Trump’s “big beautiful bill” that may still be case.

What we didn’t forecast was the interface of networks, protocols, tokenized identities, would be used to reassert the shift to territory – not away from it.

“The empire will end. All empires do. This one is no different.” — Bill Bonner

Where does capital go when governments become irrelevant? It used to be gold. Now, it may be language models tailored to your private family office, or governance tokens staked in jurisdictions that exist only in code.

Governments, of course, will not go lightly.

In his first term, President Donald Trump, sensing the threat of borderless digital governance, made sovereignty a cornerstone of policy — closing the southern border, redrawing post-WWII trade maps with tariffs, reinstating energy independence by executive order.

His second-term proposals have included AI export restrictions and establishing a “Digital Sovereignty Office” to prevent AI and crypto from overriding U.S. law. Whether one agrees or disagrees with the policy, it recognizes the chaos window and attempts to reassert jurisdiction in a borderless world.

The quickening is already here. It’s in the latency of your trades, the metadata of your thoughts, the artificial voices raising your children. The Intelligence Age isn’t just a new chapter. It’s a new volume.

For you, for me, the real question isn’t whether the paradigm is shifting. It’s how long we remain calibrated to the old one. And how carefully we preserve the wisdom of our elders in the code.

— Addison Wiggin
Grey Swan

P.S.: An actual, redacted, conversation among writers on Slack this afternoon pertaining to widespread adoption of robots:

Ian K.12:56 PM
The experience scale of robots won’t be like ChatGPT because most people won’t see one as quickly as 100 million people downloaded ChatGPT.

They robots will be featured at America 250th anniversary and 2026 World Cup.
I’m also hoping the NBA replaces human refs sooner rather than later.
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Peter C. 1:00 PM
It won’t be a 100 million-person adoption like ChatGPT, for sure (edited) but… when an optimus is walking the dog…or as clips of real folks cleaning their home with one proliferate on X … it’ll become real for folks.

Also… there’s not just one product moment here…

Even robotaxi rollouts will become more common and shocking to folks as they peer over on the road and see no one behind the wheel.
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Addison 1:15PM
I had the opposite response when I saw a robotaxi in San Francisco the first time, I thought “wtf, get away from that thing”… then we followed one for a couple of blocks to see if it would crash.
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Peter C. 2:02PM
Haha
Was it the Waymo?
Cause those look rickety to me compared to Teslas…
Sure, you’ve seen the memes online showing the two cars next to each other.
I’d feel safer with a normal-looking car (ignorance is bliss) than a car next to me with a gigantic camera rig…

Allon Y.  3:02 PM
My mother is in her 70s, and she said she wants to die before AI takes over.
She doesn’t want it in her phone, car or computer. She refuses to learn lol… She’s gotten to the point where all technology is too difficult… including the TV remote.
A little concerning since the senior population (over 65) is over 20% in FL and close to 20% countrywide, and they are the biggest investors (edited)

John M. 3:30 PM
I hear ya, my mother is the same. Getting her to use a cell phone (not a smartphone, a cell phone) took years. A computer, smartphone, or AI … forget it. [Edited]

Peter C. 3:36 PM
My parents are in their mid 70s and hoping it comes soon… robots… self driving… so they can do more and go to their summer place long after they shouldn’t be driving themselves anymore.
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Your thoughts? Please send them here: addison@greyswanfraternity.com