Van Jones got it exactly right on AI a few weeks ago at the annual TED Conference in Vancouver.
“I want to talk about a different kind of AI,” the lawyer, CNN commentator, and social entrepreneur told a gathering of some of the world’s most influential. “I want to talk about ancient intelligence, AI. I want to talk about ancestral intelligence, AI.” He then added a third: “asphalt intelligence” — that which derives from lived experience, which is sometimes a harsh teacher.
With the directness that has always distinguished him, Jones called out the danger that’s not often discussed in tech circles: “I worry that we’re building this brave new world, with all this data, but no wisdom. Where is the wisdom going to come from?”
TED, a salon of some of the world’s best students, is an intimate place where scientists, scholars, and leaders of technology shape the next moral-intellectual consensus. This year was exceptional and leavened by a recurring and urgent call: that we have to get this AI-moment right.
A year ago, TED was not anti-AI, but its mood was unusually anxious. The conference opened with Carole Cadwalladr warning of a “technological coup” by “tech bro oligarchs.” She was followed by AI pioneer Yoshua Bengio arguing we are “playing with fire” with risks deserving placement alongside pandemics and nuclear war. Sam Altman’s closing interview with curator Chris Anderson, whom I helped prep for their dialogue, was tense. Speakers celebrated AI’s promise but warned of its dangers in the same breath.
TED2026 was a matured and different room.
Themed “All of Us” (a synchronicity with my upcoming book), it gathered a remarkable constellation of brilliant and influential minds: Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai, neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, constitutional lawyer Neal Katyal, and scholar of consciousness itself, Anil Seth, among dozens of others.
And Van Jones. I’ll come back to his clarion call for ancient, ancestral, and asphalt intelligence soon (the new AIs).
I’ve spent the past several years pulling together my upcoming book, Love Conquers Fear: AI, Humanity, and the Coming Age of Abundance for All. With emphasis on “for All,” my book is about ancient philosophy, social transformation, and the sweep of technologies that I call the Superfecta — AI, robotics, quantum computing, and brain-computer interfaces. The elements of this suite of technologies are arriving not separately but as a convergence, taking us toward a new bend in the spiritual river of humanity.
This is why I was so moved by Van Jones’ call to nurture the ancient and ancestral, which brings me to my essential point: technology doesn’t rob us of our humanity. It awakens it.
Everyone in AI circles is familiar with the analogies of the technologies emerging at mind-boggling speed. You’ve certainly heard that AI is equivalent to the discovery of fire. That it’s a technology more powerful than Gutenberg’s press. The industrial revolution. Ubiquitous electricity. Something more radically change-making than the silicon chip or even the internet itself.
The analogies are fine; metaphors are by definition approximate – a point underscored by Anil, a new friend and author of the 2021 bestseller, Being You: A New Science of Consciousness.
The Convergence We’ve Seen Before
Let me give you a new metaphor for this moment — the Iron Age. More than three millennia ago, the Iron Age is a better analogy from our past if we are to understand our future.
Before the innovation of iron smelting around 1200 BCE, the casting of bronze required tin alloy, a scarce commodity traded over vast distances. Metallurgy served only the rich and powerful. But the innovation of high-temperature furnaces, which is my rough analogy with abundance-creating AI, enabled use of a plentiful resource called iron and resulted in a more abundant, scalable metal economy. It wasn’t just a new metal. It was a restructuring of how societies made tools and weapons, distributing power more broadly than ever before.
The Bronze Age collapsed, and the Iron Age emerged to last for the next 600 years: a massive paradigm shift, in today’s parlance. What happened? A lot.
Palace economies crumbled. The warrior elites who had controlled civilization through their monopoly on bronze found their advantage dissolving. Iron ore was everywhere. Any village blacksmith could work it. In a remarkably short period, the material basis of the old order was gone.
What followed was disruption on a scale the ancient world had never seen. But also something unexpected. Something that should give us hope — and that I believe ties back to TED and a glimmer of something afoot.
This was what philosopher Karl Jaspers called the “Axial Age” in his seminal 1949 book, The Origin and Goal of History. Within a few centuries of that technological disruption, humanity experienced the most extraordinary flowering of wisdom and consciousness in recorded history. New abundance led to new and widespread reflection, Jaspers argued convincingly. Between roughly 800 and 200 BCE, in civilizations with little or no contact with each other, something astonishing happened simultaneously. It’s akin to my belief in the coming Age of Abundance for All.
Confucius and Laozi in China. The Buddha and the Upanishadic sages in India. The Hebrew prophets. Zoroaster in Persia. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle in Greece. Jaspers was struck by the near-simultaneity of their emergence across cultures — as if humanity, collectively, had been jolted awake.
While his framework focused on the Old World, the Axial Age coincided with remarkable ceremonial and cultural flourishing in the Americas as well, about which we know considerably less. In Mesoamerica, the Olmec civilization — ancestor to all later Mesoamerican cultures — was at its height. In the Andes, the Chavín culture was establishing the first pan-Andean ceremonial tradition. In North America, the Adena culture was flourishing in the Ohio Valley, part of a broader Late Woodland flowering that would eventually give rise to the Haudenosaunee confederacy — whose model of governance, as I explore in my Love Conquers Fear book as a New Model for Humanity, reached Benjamin Franklin and shaped the architecture of the United States Constitution.
For it wasn’t just iron. The same period saw the democratization of writing through the spread of alphabetic script — suddenly literacy was no longer the exclusive property of a priestly scribal class. Ideas could travel, accumulate, be argued across generations. And coinage emerged, introducing abstraction into everyday life — a universal, dematerialized measure of value that trained minds to think beyond the concrete and particular toward the universal and conceptual.
In other words, it wasn’t one technology. It was a convergence — iron, alphabetic writing, coinage — each individually significant, but together transformative in ways none would have been alone.
In an essay I wrote toward the beginning of last year, After the Thaw of Two “AI Winters”, a Spiritual Spring Heats Up Our “Consciousness Winter, I explored what I called the “consciousness winters” of the modern era — those periods when serious inquiry into the nature of mind and awareness was frozen out of mainstream science and culture. The concept mirrors the well-known “AI winters,” those funding droughts and credibility collapses that have periodically set back machine learning research. Just as AI has had its winters, so has our understanding of consciousness.
The first consciousness winter descended in the mid-20th century, when the mechanistic view of the mind as mere stimulus and response took hold, and the rich introspective tradition of William James and Wilhelm Wundt disappeared from respectable scientific discourse. James — sometimes called the father of American psychology — had coined the very term “stream of consciousness” and devoted his life to understanding its nature. That work became taboo almost overnight as the new discipline of behavioralism took over consciousness research.
A thaw came in the 1950s and into the 1960s — Aldous Huxley, Abraham Maslow, the birth of humanistic psychology and the self-actualization movement, centered intellectually at the Esalen Institute in California. But it didn’t hold. By the 1980s and 1990s, the conservative cultural zeitgeist combined with Daniel Dennett’s influential and reductive book Consciousness Explained — which essentially explained consciousness away — ushered in a second consciousness winter. The hard questions were dismissed. The mystery was declared solved, or irrelevant.
When the Ice Cracks
Now spring is coming again. And driving it is the Superfecta — along with an increasingly serious scientific reckoning with the role psychedelics have played, and can play, in our understanding of consciousness. One can hear the ice cracking.
Today we have our own convergence of technologies — the Superfecta of artificial intelligence, quantum computing, robotics, and brain-computer interfaces — each individually staggering, together potentially civilizational. Like the Iron Age convergence of iron, alphabetic writing, and coinage, no single technology in the Superfecta alone explains the transformation underway. It is their arrival together — simultaneous, mutually amplifying — that is producing the same vertigo the ancient world felt when the Bronze Age certainties crumbled.
And here is what the Axial Age teaches us that the current AI conversation too often ignores: the Buddha was not responding to iron tools. Socrates was not theorizing about coinage. They were responding to the existential disorientation that technological disruption created — the collapse of old certainties, the sudden opening of space for the most fundamental questions. Who am I? What is real? How should I live? What is consciousness?
The technologies created the conditions. The wisdom arose from the depth of the human response.
But today, some are trying to build a sentient machine without first understanding sentience. Many in Silicon Valley are trying to replicate human consciousness without knowing what consciousness is. The Superfecta has made the hard problem of consciousness not merely a philosophical puzzle but a practical, epistemic imperative.
Anil — one of the world’s foremost consciousness researchers — has spent his career arguing that consciousness is not something the brain has, but something the brain does, a controlled hallucination that constructs our experience of reality. It is a compelling framework. But I don’t believe it’s the whole story.
Teilhard de Chardin, the Jesuit priest and paleontologist whose vision of an evolving, spiritually convergent universe anticipated much of what we are now living through, suggested something more radical: that we are not human beings having a spiritual experience, but spiritual beings having a human experience. Consciousness, in this view, is not produced by the brain; it is something the brain tunes into, something fundamental to the fabric of reality itself, as primary as gravity or light.
This is the view I explore in my positive science-fiction novella The Lattice — that consciousness is not an emergent property of matter but the ground of being from which matter itself arises. It is a view increasingly supported not just by contemplative traditions stretching back to the Upanishads, but by serious researchers in quantum biology, near-death experience studies, and the new science of psychedelics. If consciousness is fundamental rather than produced, then building AGI without a theory of consciousness is not just philosophically incomplete. It may be the most consequential blind spot in the history of science.
This is the consciousness spring. The veil is getting thinner. And like the Axial Age it mirrors, it is arriving not despite technological disruption, but because of it.
Wisdom — The Ultimate Technology
Which brings us back to Van Jones, standing before some of the most powerful people on earth, including many engineering the technological disruption, speaking not about algorithms or model weights or compute clusters — but about ancient intelligence, ancestral intelligence, and asphalt intelligence.
He was not being nostalgic. He was being precise.
Jones named something the tech world rarely admits: that abundance without wisdom is its own kind of poverty. “The printing press created abundant information,” he observed, “and two hundred years of religious wars. The industrial revolution created material abundance — and communism, fascism, and two world wars.” The pattern is not reassuring. Transformative technology, unaccompanied by commensurate growth in human wisdom, tends to produce catastrophe before it produces flourishing.
“Abundance without participation, abundance without inclusion, feels like scarcity,” he said. “You think of it as scaling abundance, but we feel it as scaling scarcity.”
This is what Jones calls the adaptation gap — the chasm between the exponential curve of technological advance and the linear slope of human evolution and institutional response. You cannot legislate your way across it. “If you think Congress can catch a train moving that fast,” he said, “you have never met a U.S. senator.” The answer is not to decelerate the technology. It is to accelerate humanity.
And that is where the Axial Age becomes not merely an interesting historical parallel but an urgent practical model. The Iron Age gave us the Buddha and Socrates not because someone planned a wisdom initiative or convened a panel of philosophers. It gave them to us because the disruption was profound enough, and the questions urgent enough, that the deepest human capacities for reflection were summoned. The crisis called forth the sages.
Jones understands this in his bones. His father was born in 1944 in a shotgun shack in the American South. Jones is a ninth-generation American, but the first with full rights. What carried that family forward was not data. It was not processing power. It was Jones’ ancestral intelligence — the hard-won wisdom of people who had navigated impossible circumstances through moral clarity, communal bonds, and a vision of the future that transcended their present suffering.
“He had ancestral intelligence to fight through every obstacle,” Jones said of his father, “and I want to do the same for my children.”
It is a profound responsibility — and a profound opportunity. Just as my children have no experience of a world without the internet, without email, without a smartphone in their pocket, my grandchildren may grow up in a world where ancient diseases are history, where poverty has been genuinely eliminated, where energy from the sun is so abundant it is effectively free. A world almost unimaginable from where we stand today, yet closer than we think.
Jones’ children will be born into that civilization — one being assembled in real time, in code, in laboratories, in the minds of people assembled at TED. But he asked: “Will it be human? And will it be civilized?”
Those are not rhetorical questions. They are the big questions of our Axial Age.
Jones closed with a challenge and a vision — and, it turns out, a concrete plan already in motion. Hope AI, co-chaired by Jones and Operation HOPE founder John Hope Bryant, is a national platform focused on grassroots AI literacy, financial literacy, and access for underserved communities. It is less a startup than a movement — a delivery and empowerment infrastructure designed to ensure that the abundance the Superfecta promises actually reaches the people who have historically been last in line for it. Jones has also backed Untapped Solutions, an AI-enabled platform he describes as essentially a LinkedIn for formerly incarcerated people, helping them navigate reentry into society and the workforce. Taken together, these initiatives embody exactly what Jones called for from the TED stage: a new deal between technology and humanity written not in the language of fear but in the language of inclusion.
“On the tech side,” he said, “a little less greed and speed. On the grassroots side, a little less shame and blame, a little more space and grace.”
It sounds modest. It is actually everything. Because what Jones is calling for — what the consciousness spring is calling for, what the Axial Age modeled — is the recognition that technology does not come with wisdom pre-installed. Wisdom is what humans bring to technology. It is what we have always brought, in our best moments, to the tools that threatened to outrun us.
The Iron Age gave us the Buddha and Socrates. The printing press, for all its wars, gave us the Reformation and the Enlightenment. The industrial revolution, for all its suffering, gave us the labor movement, public education, and modern medicine. Disruption and wisdom have always been in a race. In our finest hours, wisdom has caught up.
We are in that race again. The Superfecta is the most powerful convergence of technologies in human history. The consciousness spring is the wisdom tradition stirring in response. Ancient intelligence, ancestral intelligence, and asphalt intelligence may turn out to be the most important acronym in the AI conversation. Not because it competes with artificial intelligence, but because it is the only thing that can complete it.
Van Jones got it exactly right, and it was a moment that I will not forget.
