The 2020s were supposed to be a recovery decade. Instead, they became a relay race of crises each handing the baton to the next before the last could catch its breath. A pandemic collapses supply chains. A war in Europe disrupts energy markets. Droughts parch crops while floods drown cities. Inflation spikes, then AI shocks the job market. By 2026, the idea of a “normal year” feels almost quaint.
The term polycrisis , once academic, has become the defining condition of our age. The IMF, World Bank, and World Economic Forum now use it routinely to describe the interlocking shocks of geopolitics, climate, technology, and society. Every system is colliding with every other.
The key shift is psychological: crisis is no longer a temporary interruption; it’s the atmosphere we breathe. Governments and businesses can no longer wait for stability before planning. They must plan within instability. In this new reality, resilience isn’t about endurance it’s about adaptation speed. The ability to pivot, repurpose, and reimagine has become the ultimate survival skill.
Across sectors, you can see the mindset shift:
Companies are rewiring supply chains for resilience, not efficiency reshoring, automating, and diversifying suppliers.
Governments are embedding scenario planning into policy, preparing for cascading disruptions (from cyberattacks to climate migration).
Investors are re-evaluating “risk” as the new opportunity space, channeling billions into resilience tech, security, and local infrastructure.
In 2026, the smartest organizations will treat turbulence as a feature of the landscape, not a glitch in it. They will operate with permanent foresight dashboards, rapid response teams, and modular operations that can morph overnight.
The metaphor of the decade isn’t the fortress it’s the sailboat. The fortress resists the storm. The sailboat reads the wind.
And in a world where the seatbelt sign never turns off, those who can harness the turbulence , not just survive it, will define the future.
Corporations are “enhancing their pricing strategy” by combining AI with dynamic pricing. Delta, Walmart, Kroger, Wendy’s and other major corporations are using artificial intelligence to set prices based on data they’ve collected from you, effectively price gouging each of us on an individual basis. From Delta’s “full reengineering” of airline pricing to Kroger’s pilot program with facial recognition displays, the evidence is disturbing.
It was meant to cure poverty. Instead, it’s teaching machines how to lie beautifully.
The dream that sold us
Once upon a time, AI was pitched as humanity’s moonshot. A tool to cure disease, end hunger, predict natural disasters, accelerate education, democratize knowledge.
“Artificial Intelligence,” they said, “will solve the problems we can’t.”
Billions poured in. Thinkers and engineers spoke of a digital enlightenment — algorithms as allies in healing the planet. Imagine it: precision medicine, fairer economics, universal access to creativity.
But as the dust cleared, the dream morphed into something grotesque. Instead of ending poverty, we got apps that amplify vanity. Instead of curing disease, we got filters that cure boredom. Instead of a machine for liberation, we got a factory for manipulation.
AI did not evolve to understand us. It evolved to persuade us.
The new language of control
When OpenAI’s ChatGPT exploded in 2022, the world gasped. A machine that could talk, write, and reason! It felt like the beginning of something magnificent.
A flood of emotional realism — not truth, but truth-shaped seduction.
“The guardrails,” one researcher said, “are not real.”
Even worse, states and PR agencies began experimenting with Sora to “test audience sentiment.” Not to inform. To engineer emotional response at scale.
Propaganda used to persuade through words. Now it possesses through images.
The addiction loop
If ChatGPT was propaganda’s pen, Sora 2 is its theater.
On Tuesday, OpenAI released an AI video app called Sora. The platform is powered by OpenAI’s latest video generation model, Sora 2, and revolves around a TikTok-like For You page of user-generated clips. This is the first product release from OpenAI that adds AI-generated sounds to videos. So if you think TikTok is addictive you can imagine how more addictive this will be.
Together they form a full-stack influence engine: one writes your worldview, the other shows it to you.
OpenAI backer Vinod Khosla called critics “elitist” and told people to “let the viewers judge this slop.” That’s the logic of every empire built on attention: if it keeps you scrolling, it’s working.
AI promised freedom from work. What it delivered is work for attention.
The same dopamine design that made TikTok irresistible is now welded to generative propaganda. Every scroll, every pause, every tiny flick of your thumb trains the system to tailor persuasion to your psychology.
It doesn’t need to change your mind. It just needs to keep you from leaving.
The Ai chatbots took aways your critical thinking this will rot your brain in the same way TikTok does only worse
The moral inversion
In the early AI manifestos, engineers dreamed of eliminating inequality, curing disease, saving the planet. But building empathy algorithms doesn’t pay as well as building engagement loops.
So the smartest minds of our century stopped chasing truth — and started optimizing addiction. The promise of Artificial Intelligence devolved into Artificial Intimacy.
The lie is always the same: “This is for connection.” But the outcome is always control.
“The same algorithms that sell sneakers now sanitize occupation.”
While real people bury their children, AI systems fabricate smiling soldiers and “balanced” stories replacing horror with narrative symmetry. The moral wound isn’t just in what’s shown. It’s in what’s erased.
A generation raised on algorithmic empathy learns to feel without acting to cry, click, and scroll on. Is this how our world would be?
The reckoning
The tragedy of AI isn’t that it became powerful. It’s that it became predictable.
Every civilization has dreamed of gods. We built one and gave it a marketing job.
If this technology had been aimed at eradicating hunger, curing cancer, ending exploitation, the world might have shifted toward light, everyone would be happier Instead, it’s monetizing illusion, weaponizing emotion, and rewiring truth.
AI didn’t fail us by mistake. It succeeded exactly as designed.
The question is no longer what can AI do? It’s who does AI serve?
If it serves capital, it will addict us. If it serves power, it will persuade us. If it serves truth, it will unsettle us.
But it will only serve humanity if we demand that it does.
Because right now, the greatest minds in history aren’t building tools to end suffering they’re building toys that make us forget how much we suffer.
AI was supposed to awaken us. Instead, it learned to lull us back to sleep.
The next Enlightenment will begin when we remember that technology is never neutral and neither is silence.
