The Convergence

Take the three forces together, for it is in their convergence and not in any one alone that the deadline appears. Capability — including intelligence itself — is becoming abundant and is amplifying the consequences of everything human beings do. Trust, the substrate of coordination, is eroding precisely as that amplification rises. And the slow variables of the living world are coming due on a timescale that demands exactly the long-horizon coordination that the first two forces are making harder. Each force, alone, would be serious. Together, they describe a civilization whose power is rising, whose capacity to coordinate that power is falling, and whose margin for getting the coordination right is shrinking.

This is the imperative the title of this volume names. It is not that Providence, specifically, must be built — we are not so arrogant as to claim that any single proposal is civilization's necessary salvation, and we have said throughout that Providence is an experiment, not an answer. The imperative is more fundamental and more undeniable than any particular proposal: that some coordination infrastructure adequate to this convergence must be built, and built in time, or every other effort — every technical breakthrough, every policy, every act of goodwill — will be undertaken by a civilization progressively less able to coordinate its own response to its own situation. Coordination is becoming the master problem, the one whose solution conditions the solubility of all the others.

Without a coordination layer adequate to the acceleration, every institution becomes less reliable, every powerful technology less steerable, every slow crisis less addressable, and every act of goodwill less able to find the others it needs. Coordination is not one problem among many. It is the problem that determines whether the others can be solved at all.