AI and Ecocivilization: The Unexpected Opportunity

AI is accelerating the extractive powers of capitalism—but the earthquake it’s setting off may crack open pathways toward a transformation that once seemed decades away.

This is the second in a three-part series exploring how AI and ecocivilization relate.

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In the first article of this series, I laid out the profound threats that AI poses to human flourishing. Developed within a vortex of global capitalism, AI is being harnessed, above all, to intensify the forces of extraction and exploitation—accelerating our civilization toward a precipice at a speed and scale never seen before.

And yet, as I hinted at in my previous piece, the very dangers presented by AI’s ascendancy might just turn out to be the catalysts of a pivot toward a society based on fairness, justice, and dignity—one that the vast majority of us would choose over the tech-induced dystopia that looms. In this article, I explore that possibility, pointing to an unexpected opening that AI’s disruption may be creating for those of us working toward a life-affirming future.

To see how this might be the case, we need a framework for understanding how deep transformation occurs.

An Earthquake in the Landscape of Change

In earlier pieces, I’ve drawn on two complementary models to make sense of civilizational transformation. The Adaptive Cycle model describes how every complex adaptive system—from a cell to an ecosystem to a civilization—passes through four phases: a growth phase of innovation, a long conservation phase in which the system becomes increasingly stable but brittle, a release phase triggered by some tipping point, and finally a renewal phase in which small chance events can drastically shape what emerges. Many believe that our current world system is somewhere in the late conservation phase, sliding with gathering momentum toward release.

Alongside this, the Three Horizons model offers a framework that permits us to relate current needs to a longer-term vision. The First Horizon refers to short-term planning, which is essential for daily and monthly accomplishments, but only if the right direction has already been set. The Third Horizon refers to ideas that are outside the ballpark altogether, representing a fundamentally transformed system such as an ecocivilization. Between them lies the Second Horizon, a zone of disruption where competing visions of the future contend. Crucially, those who use this model distinguish between Second Horizon initiatives that lead back to the First Horizon, known as H2−, and those that open a door toward the Third, known as H2+.

The massive dislocations of AI are now striking the Three Horizons landscape like a gigantic earthquake, opening up an unprecedented opportunity. Its disruptive force is so immense that it’s launching us directly into the Second Horizon: increasingly, in many parts of society, there is no more “business as usual.” But as the ground buckles, fissures emerge—some of which crack open toward the Third Horizon. Possibilities that, until recently, seemed decades away, beyond the furthest visible horizon, suddenly seem within reach—potentially available within just a few years.

The earthquake of AI is opening up cracks to the Third Horizon

This is the momentous and epochal paradox created by the rise of AI. The same force that, on one hand threatens to lock in digital feudalism, is also tearing apart the tight weave of the dominant system—and, in doing so, offers an unexpected and urgent chance to reweave society’s fabric before it entirely unravels.

The Overton Window, Cracked Wide Open

Nowhere is this clearer than in what has happened to the Overton window.

The set of ideas deemed acceptable to mainstream thinking is known as the Overton window, named after policy analyst Joseph Overton. As I’ve described in an earlier piece, one of the great lessons of the neoliberal takeover of the twentieth century was how the Mont Pelerin Society, over several decades, assiduously shifted that window toward its preferred set of ideas—slashing regulations, marketizing public services, and crushing trade unions—until proposals once considered fringe became unquestioned common sense.

Shifting the Overton window has, until now, been painstaking work. It took thirty years of coordinated, interconnected strategies before neoliberalism began to take hold. But AI’s disruption has done something extraordinary: it has cracked the window wide open in a matter of months. Ideas that until recently were conventionally dismissed as utopian—universal basic income (UBI), public ownership of society’s productive wealth, and a right to a shorter working week—are suddenly being debated in mainstream newspapers, proposed by senators, and even floated by CEOs of the very AI companies driving the disruption.

It’s easy to understand why this is the case. AI is threatening a historically unprecedented break in the relationship between capital and labor, as it moves from software into robotics and the physical economy, displacing white-collar and blue-collar workers alike. When AI can write code, draft contracts, analyze data, generate medical diagnoses, and automate factories, the bargaining power of workers in those fields collapses. The gains flow overwhelmingly to the owners of the AI systems, and millions of people become unemployed while the rest of the population must contend with the disruption.

With this turbulence in the field, Second Horizons solutions previously considered radical begin, suddenly, to look more like common sense.

The Greatest Enclosure in History

To see what’s at stake, we must turn back to the original enclosure movement. Beginning in late medieval England, common lands—pastures, woods, and fields that for centuries had been shared by all—were fenced off and converted into private property. A resource that had belonged to everyone was violently captured by a few, and a population that had sustained itself on the commons was dispossessed and driven into dependent wage labor. It was one of the great thefts of history, and it laid the foundation for industrial capitalism.

At this pivotal moment, we are now facing an enclosure of far greater scale. The large language models reshaping our economy were trained on the accumulated knowledge, creativity, and expressions of humanity—books, art, conversations, code, scientific discoveries, and cultural traditions built up over countless generations. These treasures represent the cumulative ingenuity and industriousness of our ancestors going back to earliest times: the commonwealth of our shared human legacy. Now, captured by a handful of corporations, this immeasurable inheritance is being repackaged as a proprietary product and sold back to us, while the value it generates is funneled up the wealth pump to a tiny elite.

This is the result of what I’ve referred to as Windigo’s Law, operating now at unprecedented scale. But the very magnitude of this brazen theft opens up an opportunity. Once people recognize that AI is built on the theft of our commonwealth, an inescapable moral conclusion is that the wealth it generates rightly belongs, in significant part, to all of us. This calls for a massive response based on a foundation of collective moral outrage.

Breadcrumbs from the Banquet Table

The architects of this enclosure are only too aware of this problem. Companies like OpenAI know that the future they’re hawking is deeply flawed. When the company recently released its policy blueprint for the “Intelligence Age,” it had to concede that the economic disruption heading our way is unlike anything we’ve seen before. As a response, it proposes a public wealth fund seeded partly by AI companies, with returns distributed directly to citizens. It’s an acknowledgment that something is going badly wrong with how AI’s gains are being distributed. But let’s be clear about what it represents: breadcrumbs.

OpenAI offers the rest of us its breadcrumbs

OpenAI’s blueprint can be understood more like a wish list dressed up as a policy proposal—a company telling regulators how it would like to be regulated. It calls for a fund that would be seeded only “partly” by AI companies, on terms the industry would presumably determine. Importantly, it contains no mechanism to ensure the public receives a minimum level of returns, and no democratic governance over the AI systems that are reshaping our world. The strategy may be understood as appearing to be generous simply by tossing a few breadcrumbs to the wretched masses below, while the greatest enclosure in history proceeds apace.

And yet the fact that these ideas are being voiced at all—by the very people building the technology—is itself a measure of how far the Overton window has shifted. Sam Altman now muses publicly about “universal basic compute“ and public wealth funds. The Trump administration has reportedly been in talks with him about an equity stake in AI companies. Even Elon Musk has floated what he calls “universal high income.“ When ideas travel this fast to becoming the headlining comments of tech billionaires, you know the ground has moved: we are tumbling into the Second Horizon. At this point, it becomes crucially important that we move beyond the breadcrumbs on offer, rejecting H2– solutions, and demanding pathways to a Third Horizon that’s suddenly within reach.

From Breadcrumbs to a Commonwealth

Let us not forget that every writer, teacher, and researcher who ever put words on a page has contributed, without compensation or consent, to the substrate upon which AI’s productive capacity was built. As the greatest enclosure of the commons in history, this changes the moral frame of the entire discussion about the wealth being created. What is called for is a social dividend to all humanity—not as redistribution but as restitution. This must be understood as a legitimate claim by every one of us to our share in the commonwealth.

These ideas have a long pedigree. Thomas Paine, who helped inspire the American Revolution and wrote The Rights of Man, was among the first to articulate the moral logic of what we now call a universal basic income (UBI). “It is not charity but a right,” Paine wrote, “not bounty but justice, that I am pleading for.”

This is an important distinction. UBI is frequently regarded as a form of welfare, unearned handouts that carry stigma. A dividend, by contrast, is premised on the fact that we are all stakeholders in a collective inheritance. It no more requires justification than a shareholder needs justification for receiving returns on an asset they already own.

Driven by AI’s disruptions, these Third Horizon ideas are turning up in the developing conversation all across the political spectrum. At one end, The Economist—not typically known for radical economic proposals—recently opined that “the partial nationalisation of AI firms” deserves consideration, noting that “public ownership is the best way to make the social upside from the technology transparent.” At the other, Senator Bernie Sanders has announced the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act, which would give the public a fifty percent ownership stake in the nation’s largest AI companies.

Bernie Sanders is leading the way on shifting the Overton Window

Remarkably, this is no longer a fringe position. A recent survey found that an astonishing 69 percent of Americans support requiring the largest AI companies to transfer half their stock into a public sovereign wealth fund. When The Economist and Bernie Sanders find themselves gesturing toward the same idea supported by the overwhelming majority of Americans, you know the Overton window has been blown wide open.

Sanders makes the commonwealth argument explicitly: AI, he points out, is built on something akin to the oil that funds existing sovereign wealth funds—a shared resource that belongs to the entire community, not just those who extract it.

These sovereign wealth funds offer a model to build upon—though their differences carry a crucial lesson. Alaska’s Permanent Fund, created in 1976 from state oil-lease revenues to benefit all Alaskans, has grown to $80 billion and pays every resident, including children, an annual dividend ranging from around $1,000 to $3,000. It’s widely popular, but is also subject to political meddling, and is increasingly raided to support the state’s fiscal needs rather than sustain a stable dividend. Norway, by contrast, after the discovery of North Sea oil, established its sovereign wealth fund with a trust structure independent of central government, and thus immunized against political manipulation. That fund now holds some $1.6 trillion and makes distributions to citizens on the basis of a five-year average of investment returns.

This contrast offers an important lesson in how the wealth generated by AI should be managed. Rather than become a plaything of politicians, it should be held, consistent with the Norway model, in an autonomous Commonwealth Trust structurally shielded from both corporate and political capture. Such a trust would hold a significant ownership stake in the AI economy on behalf of everyone, and distribute the proceeds as a “social dividend”: a guaranteed, unconditional, periodic payment to every resident. Importantly, this dividend would not act as a substitute for public services but as a complement to them.

Who Governs the Commonwealth?

A trust of this magnitude raises a crucial question around how it should be governed. A fund holding the collective wealth of an AI-driven economy would wield enormous power. Left to conventional politics, even an autonomous trust could easily be subject to control by the same concentrated interests it was meant to counterbalance—becoming, in effect, another lever of the wealth pump rather than a means of dismantling it.

This is why the opening of the Overton Window needs to extend beyond issues of public ownership to new formulations for public governance. And here, another Third Horizon idea, already germinating around the world, offers a pathway: the burgeoning global movement of citizens’ assemblies—deliberative bodies in which a representative, randomly selected cross-section of the public is convened to consider complex policy questions. These assemblies have proven their ability to provide thoughtful recommendations on the most contentious issues. Ireland’s citizens’ assembly on abortion rights, for example, led to a landmark constitutional referendum; while France’s Citizens’ Convention on Climate produced a comprehensive package of ecological policy proposals. In both cases, ordinary citizens, given time, access to expert testimony, and facilitated deliberation, reached conclusions that elected politicians had long avoided.

A similarly constituted body could govern a Commonwealth Trust’s investment priorities and distribution policy. Its sortition structure would shield it from both corporate lobbying and political pressure—and, unlike a conventional regulatory agency, it would carry a direct mandate from the public it serves. Importantly, that mandate could extend beyond merely managing the fund. The same collective intelligence that has made citizens’ assemblies so effective on climate or reproductive rights is needed even more urgently for questions about how AI should develop: which capabilities to prioritize, how to establish safety parameters, and what kind of society we actually want to live in. These are questions that should rightfully be decided by the people who will have to live with the answers.

A Crisis that Produces Real Change

We can now discern dual pathways leading directly to the Third Horizon: public ownership of the commonwealth reframed as a social dividend, and governance of our common destiny through deliberative democracy. Not long ago, each would have been broadly dismissed as utopian. And yet AI’s disruption is now catapulting them into the mainstream conversation, cracking the ground open toward possibilities that seemed decades away.

History tells us that this is the kind of moment that can be seized. As Milton Friedman, a founding member of the Mont Pelerin Society, famously observed: “Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.” This was a secret of the neoliberals’ success: they remained uncompromising in their long-term vision while pouncing on every crisis as an opportunity. When Reagan took office in 1981, the Heritage Foundation handed him a thousand-page manual of concrete policy proposals; an estimated 775 of them were adopted.

We are now living through a unfolding crisis whose proportions dwarf those of the 1970s that led to the Reagan/Thatcher takeover of public discourse. The AI-driven disruption represents a release phase of the Adaptive Cycle arriving as an earthquake of historic proportions. When the ground buckles, whose ideas will be lying around? Will it be breadcrumbs from the billionaires, dressed up as generosity while the greatest enclosure in history proceeds? Or an authentic commonwealth, held in trust for all, governed democratically, and distributed as the birthright it is?

Widening the Path as We Walk

Each of us has an important role to play in answering this question. Third Horizon pathways may be opening up, but they will only remain accessible if enough of us step into them and broaden them into highways. The future is not a spectator sport: it is something we all co-create as part of the interconnected web of our collective thoughts, ideas, and actions.

The cracks allowing us to glimpse the Third Horizon will not stay open indefinitely. Our task is to ensure that transformative ideas—the Commonwealth Trust, a social dividend as a right, deliberative democracy governing our shared wealth—are developed, vividly articulated, and at hand when the crisis deepens.

The AI revolution is going to transform the world. The key question is whether that transformation is imposed on us for the benefit of a tiny ownership class, or created in partnership with us, as an authentic move toward shared human flourishing. Martin Luther King Jr., writing shortly before his assassination, grasped what is at stake: “The dignity of the individual will flourish when the decisions concerning his life are in his own hands, when he has the assurance that his income is stable and certain, and when he knows that he has the means to seek self-improvement.”

Future generations, looking back at this moment, may struggle to comprehend how, in an era of such unprecedented productive capacity, we hesitated to collect an inheritance that belonged to all of us. Let’s not settle for breadcrumbs.

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Ecocivilization: Making a World that Works for All

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Jeremy Lent, is an author and speaker whose work investigates the underlying causes of our civilization’s existential crisis, and explores pathways toward a life-affirming future. He is founder of the Deep Transformation Network and co-founder of the Ecocivilization Coalition. His previous two books were The Web of Meaning and The Patterning Instinct.

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