They want the spectacle—the robot that will fold their laundry, do the dishes, and guide them to their next best purchase on Amazon. The fascinations continue even into the doom and gloom—the possibility that AI will turn on us, dropping nuclear bombs into our underwear overnight.

But not many are paying attention to this…

AI is exposing errors and accelerating the breakdown of long-standing institutions, and it is also shaping whatever comes next.

It is a sign of the times.

AI is unfolding in the midst of what The Fourth Turning describes as a decisive period of crisis. Author Neil Howe and William Strauss write:

"The Fourth Turning is a Crisis, a decisive era of secular upheaval, when the values regime propels the replacement of the old civic order with a new one."

In this context, the values regime propelling AI's growth is more than just technological ideals; they are survival traits in a system undergoing creative destruction. Each value driving AI reflects the pressures, competitions, and opportunities of a world reorganizing itself for the next era.

The values regime I am talking about is not simply the values of the technocratic elite. I am talking about values that must be embodied for the sake of survival through adaptability. AI can be used for better or for worse, domination or decentralized freedom, and right now, institutions and their leaders are racing to adapt to AI's implications.

That implication is widespread forced dismantling of institutions. It happens during crises. It happens through technological advancement. And it happens simply as the underlying feature of capitalism. Systemic collapse is happening everywhere—especially to our institutions.

Strauss and Howe write, "Fourth Turnings function as periods of 'creative destruction' for social and political institutions."

One important emphasis I want to make is that the institutional breakdown and renewal which occurs in a Fourth Turning is not the typical "progress" narrative we are used to, even though that's what we hear in the news. We see the videos, the chatbots, and the ability of the Large Language Model (LLM) to retrieve, organize, and provide an output, but what we don't recognize is the bigger context containing all this change. That context is the Fourth Turning.