Every once in a while, humanity discovers a new fulcrum.
The wheel was a fulcrum. On it rested the first levers of civilization: commerce, agriculture, and primitive industry.
The printing press was a fulcrum. A single idea could be multiplied many times over and become a steering force for the world.
The steam engine was a fulcrum. Its levers were railroads and steamboats and all manner of industrial machinery. Thus the industrial revolution; and for the first time in human history, part of the masses were lifted out of our short, brutish lives into a manufactured dignity.
Then everything, all at once. Electricity. Radio. Airplanes. Transistors.
With the Internet, we saw a fulcrum that enabled an enormous number of levers. Some were plainly good. But some levers continuously evolved, and in the decades following, they contributed more to addiction and fraying the social contract than they did to human flourishing.
Now we stand upon a new fulcrum: Machine Intelligence. This fulcrum provides us orders of magnitude more leverage than anything before it, but it also comes with orders of magnitude more risk. We must find the right levers to rest upon it with which we can move the world.