Generative AI: The Seventh Language of Humanity

Enter the Seventh Language of Humanity: AI and the Power of Systemic Thinking

Marshall McLuhan famously said, “The medium is the message.” His insight wasn’t just about the content delivered through media, but about how the medium itself reshaped the way we think, act, and even exist.

He showed us that every new tool — from speech to writing to the internet — fundamentally changes human consciousness. What he might not have fully realized was that this evolution wasn’t just a media phenomenon. It was the evolution of human consciousness itself, unfolding in stages that have brought us to where we are today: the seventh language of humanity.

Robert Logan and McLuhan both mapped out how human communication evolved in six stages: speech, writing, mathematics, science, computers, and the internet. Each one built on the previous, absorbing and expanding the scope of human capability. Now we’ve entered a new stage, the seventh language — artificial intelligence. AI isn’t just another tool; it’s the language that encompasses all others. It allows us to see patterns and relationships we couldn’t before, helping us understand the world not as a series of isolated problems, but as a network of interconnected systems.

And this shift in perspective is crucial because we are living through what many call the polycrisis — a cluster of overlapping challenges like climate change, inequality, resource depletion, and geopolitical instability. Most of us still treat these crises as separate fires to put out. Governments, businesses, and even global organizations are running from one blaze to the next. But that’s a fragmented approach. What we really need to ask is: what made the forest flammable in the first place?

This brings us to the concept of ESG — Environmental, Social, and Governance criteria. ESG is often seen as a checklist, a set of boxes organizations need to tick off to prove they are “sustainable” or “socially responsible.” It’s a framework designed to measure corporate responsibility through 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) laid out by the United Nations. Of these, 12 are often the core focus for businesses aiming to address social and environmental issues. Yet, too often, ESG is treated like an isolated metric. Organizations aim to fulfill their commitments on climate action (SDG 13) or gender equality (SDG 5) without recognizing how all these goals are interconnected, just like the crises we face.

ESG, in its current form, risks becoming another fragmented approach to solving systemic problems. We tend to break the issues into smaller parts, ticking off boxes without seeing the whole system. It’s like trying to solve the polycrisis by addressing each fire individually. What we need instead is a systemic view — an understanding that all these issues are interconnected. Climate change, for example, isn’t just an environmental challenge; it impacts social stability, economic inequality, health, and governance. If we continue to treat these problems in isolation, we’ll only address symptoms, not the root causes.

Bill Reed’s graph of the five paradigms — ranging from conventional to regenerative — helps illustrate the shifts in consciousness and sense-making necessary to address these complex challenges. Each paradigm reflects a different understanding of how we relate to the world. The conventional paradigm is about extraction, viewing nature as a resource to be exploited. As we progress through green and sustainable approaches, there is an increased awareness of the need to mitigate harm, but these approaches often aim to maintain the status quo. However, as we move into the restorative and regenerative paradigms, our consciousness deepens. These approaches recognize humanity’s interconnectedness with nature, encouraging actions that regenerate and co-evolve with natural systems. At its highest level, regenerative thinking represents a paradigm where we become active participants in restoring ecosystems and communities, fostering resilience and systemic harmony.

That’s why the seventh language, AI, and systems thinking are so crucial. AI can map these interconnections, helping us see relationships between environmental, social, and governance factors in ways we couldn’t before. It enables us to design solutions that address whole systems, not just individual problems. To get there, though, we need to move away from fragmented approaches and adopt a mindset that embraces the complexity of the metacrisis — the system of interrelated crises we face.

And this brings us back to systems thinking. It’s a mindset that’s been around since Ludwig von Bertalanffy introduced the idea of systems theory. But despite decades of understanding, we still don’t apply it in practice. If we want to solve the challenges ahead, we need to train ourselves in complexity theory and develop the capacities — curiosity, creativity, and the ability to make sense of the chaos. Only then can we design interventions that tackle the root causes of our interconnected crises, not just the symptoms.

With the right training, AI can be a powerful ally. We can create generative AI agents, digital twins, and other tools that can help us navigate this complexity. These tools will not only allow us to manage the polycrisis but will guide us in designing resilient systems that are future-proof. But, again, it all starts with a shift in how we see the world: not as a series of fires to be extinguished but as a system that needs to be understood and redesigned at its core.

For that, we need a roadmap. Bill Sharpe’s Three Horizons model gives us a framework to see how the future might unfold and how we can start laying the groundwork for long-term, systemic solutions.

I have explained the concept of Horizon 3 in several articles, but it’s always useful to revisit it.

The Three Horizons framework helps us think about the future by identifying three phases. Horizon 1 represents the current state of systems, often dominated by established structures and practices. Horizon 2 is the space of disruption, where emerging innovations challenge the status quo. Horizon 3 is the vision of the future, where these innovations coalesce into entirely new systems, creating a transformative shift. This model helps us understand how short-term changes can pave the way for long-term systemic evolution.

We can no longer afford to be firefighters dousing flames; we need to become architects designing a more resilient, interconnected system. And the seventh language is the tool we need to get there.

We don’t yet fully know what the seventh language will look like because it’s evolving exponentially, empowered by AI, systemic thinking, and the evolution of consciousness. As these forces converge, they are accelerating the language’s development in ways we can’t fully predict, continuously reshaping how we understand and interact with the world.

What we do see are the disruptions of Horizon 2 — technological, social, and environmental shifts — that are already shaping Horizon 3. In this emerging future, the seventh language is co-evolving with these disruptions, creating new ways of understanding and interacting with the world that we can only begin to imagine. It’s a language that’s still forming, and its full impact will unfold as it continues to merge with the systems shaping our future.

Thanks for your support!