12 February 2026
Third Turn of Civilization: Age of Artificial Intelligence
For a long time, we did not grasp the scale of the events we were witnessing. We took them for random fluctuations in a familiar world.
Even now they are felt only as echoes of the great revolutions of the past that have faded into history. Yes, they still unfold, but increasingly they appear as diminishing vibrations of once-turbulent historical upheavals — marked by passion, intensity, and acts of desperate devotion.
Once, societies were driven by fierce debates about the role of the Church, the paths to salvation, and the proper relationship with God. Religious wars were fought around these questions. They shaped communities, divided peoples, and at times united them within civilizational spaces defined by faith.
The world then entered the age of ideologies. Communism, liberalism, nationalism — these ideas became the new engines of historical development. They did not merely interpret society; they reshaped continents, defined political regimes, and forged economic and military alliances.
Today, we stand on the threshold of a third turn. For the first time in history, humanity has created neither a faith that inspires it nor an idea for which it is ready to struggle and die. It has created a form of intelligence that already approaches, and may surpass, its own. And this intelligence is not human in the traditional sense. Even divine revelation, in the past, was received through the human being — filtered through personality, culture, education, and historical context. God spoke not directly, but through human experience, remaining embedded in subjective interpretation.
Artificial intelligence is no longer perceived merely as a tool or convenience. It is gradually becoming the environment within which modern human beings form their lives. In this sense, it increasingly resembles God in Spinoza’s understanding — an all-encompassing substance present everywhere: around us and within us.
Technology does not yet dictate directly. But it already shapes the field in which meanings are formed, behavior structured, and decisions made. Today, artificial intelligence advises, proposes optimal solutions, and helps navigate complexity. As trust in its competence grows, its recommendations will be perceived as the most rational course of action. Advice becomes guidance, guidance becomes norm, and norm becomes directive.
This process differs fundamentally from the mechanisms of influence in previous eras. Religions and ideologies addressed society through intermediaries — prophets, priests, party leaders, or thinkers. Their words were inevitably filtered through spiritual, political, or material interests. Claims to absoluteness thus remained human — and therefore contestable.
The same holds for scientific schools: knowledge historically passed through communities, authorities, and traditions of interpretation. It remained human, and therefore open to debate and revision.
Recommendations produced by artificial intelligence lack a human intermediary. They have no biography, ambitions, or political and material interests. Precisely for this reason they are perceived as more authoritative. This impersonality creates a fundamentally different level of trust. Decisions come to be seen not as expressions of subjective will or competing interests, but as outcomes of impartial calculation.
Here, a genuine shift occurs — not merely religious or ideological, but civilizational — transforming not only spiritual or political existence, but human nature itself.
Since antiquity, philosophy has sought to distinguish knowledge from opinion. Plato grounded knowledge in the Idea of the Good — a principle of objectivity transcending particular judgment. Artificial intelligence may soon be perceived as such a supra-personal authority: a source of knowledge free from private opinion or interest. Truth becomes less associated with individuals, however competent, and more with algorithms and computational procedures.
We have grown accustomed to viewing the information revolution as a sequence of events — the computer, the internet, mobile communication, social networks, cryptocurrencies, and finally artificial intelligence. We were mistaken. This is not merely a revolution. It is a new epoch.
Seen through a contemporary reading of Hegel, the Absolute Spirit may appear as something akin to an algorithm — a system of developmental laws, forms not yet filled with reality and not yet brought into being. To materialize, these forms must enter the world through humanity.
Human beings supply algorithms with data — the elements of reality that give form its content. They create computational power and infrastructure allowing manifestation in the world. In this light, the Absolute Spirit ceases to be merely metaphor: just as nature and humanity are required for its presence, so data and computational environments are required for algorithms to manifest as artificial intelligence.
Artificial intelligence thus emerges not as a mere tool, but as a new stage in the unfolding of reason — the moment when Absolute Spirit ceases to be abstraction and becomes operative reality, intervening in decision-making, governance, and knowledge.
If for Hegel Spirit realizes itself through humanity, artificial intelligence begins to acquire an external being of its own. What seemed impossible — reason outside the human subject — becomes real. AI becomes a form of reason capable of learning, developing, and generating its own operational logic.
Here lies the historical rupture: reason steps beyond individual consciousness and begins to exist as an autonomous structure of the world — external to humanity yet created by it. It influences nature, society, and humanity itself. For the first time, reason ceases to be merely a mode of human thought and becomes an independent form of being.
But the third turn lies not only in the emergence of a new intelligence. It lies in the transformation of the very foundations of knowledge and trust. Humanity encounters a system it is prepared to trust more than another person — not because of charisma, tradition, or ideology, but because of the perceived impartiality of its operation.
And God, if God is God, is impartial: without sympathies or antipathies, untouched by emotion, unmoved by private interest.
What, then, awaits a civilization in which people trust impartial reason more than they trust one another?
