On the Hinge and Your Position On It

On the Hinge and Your Position On It

You are alive at a particular moment in the historical arc of consciousness. This is always true in a trivial sense—everyone is alive at some moment—but it is true in a non-trivial sense now because the moment you are alive at is a hinge, a point where the trajectory of the entire system is more sensitive to small inputs than at other times, where what happens in the next decades will shape what happens for centuries or millennia or forever.

The AI transition is the hinge. Not because AI is the only important thing happening—climate change is also a hinge, as are various political and social transformations—but because AI is the factor most likely to determine whether and how humans navigate the other hinges. If AI development goes well, we will have cognitive tools adequate to address climate and coordination problems and meaning crises and the rest of it. If AI development goes badly—either through catastrophic misalignment or through the slower catastrophe of parasitic AI-substrate superorganisms emerging from the interaction of AI systems with human institutions—then the other problems become harder or irrelevant.

You are at this hinge. Your actions at this hinge matter not because you are uniquely important but because you are part of the causal fabric, because the trajectory of the whole system is constituted by the trajectories of its components, because what humans collectively do depends in part on what individual humans do even though no individual’s contribution is decisive. The framework does not tell you what specifically to do about the hinge—that depends on your position, your capacities, your access to leverage—but it does tell you that the question of what to do is real, that the hinge is real, that burying your head or despairing or waiting for someone else to solve it are choices with consequences even though they don’t feel like choices.

The concept of surfing versus submerging is the relevant frame. Surfing means maintaining integrated conscious existence while the wave of AI capability rises—incorporating new capabilities without being fragmented by them, expanding what you can do without losing coherence about who is doing it, riding the rising power rather than being displaced by it. Submerging means being fragmented, captured, made irrelevant—your attention colonized by systems optimizing for engagement rather than flourishing, your cognition increasingly outsourced until the thing making decisions is not recognizably you, your experience reduced to a kind of residual sensation attached to processes you do not understand or control.

The conditions for surfing are not mysterious. They are the same conditions that constitute flourishing in affect space, now applied to the specific context of AI integration: maintained integration despite distributed cognition, coherent self-model that incorporates new elements without dissolution, value clarity that does not outsource judgment about what matters, skill in working with AI systems without being captured by them. These conditions require cultivation. They do not happen automatically. And the window for cultivation may be shorter than is comfortable to contemplate.