If I had to pick one quote to summarise the state of the world from the vantage point of the last days of 2025, I would go for EO Wilson’s phrase in his book Consilience. Wilson was perhaps the closest thing in recent times to a polymath, a brilliant biologist who wrote about ants but extended his vision to trends in civilisation. Towards the end he wrote: “We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom.”
I say to this: bullseye! It is easy to suppose that knowledge and wisdom are bedfellows; perhaps even synonyms. Wilson regarded them as existing in a deep, if sometimes creative, tension. Where knowledge can be gained by taking a dive into a given area, specialism or silo, wisdom is about bringing insights together, the wood rather than the trees.
There is no doubting the sheer quantity of knowledge, scientific and technological, in today’s society. On Christmas Day I spoke to my mum, who was on a cruise in the Caribbean, with a device called an iPhone, connected to the internet via satellites, and then had a video call on Zoom with other relatives on the other side of the world, before taking part in a family quiz compiled by ChatGPT, which asked questions tailored for the different age groups, beautifully formatted, within five seconds of being asked. For a visitor from 850 or 1850, or indeed a few decades ago, this would be indistinguishable from magic.
• How you’ll be using AI in 2026: note-taking rings and robotaxis
Why, then, are we in a bit of a muddle? Why has growth petered out (the Nobel laureate Robert Solow expressed the mystification of a generation of economists when he said: “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics”)? Why are countries like ours struggling with potholes or getting parts of the NHS to talk to one other, let alone running a mildly rational energy policy? How in an age of Moore’s law and other “exponentials” does life seem squeezed, violating Keynes’s prediction that we were set for an age of abundance?
I think Wilson’s observation expresses part of the answer. As technology races ahead, we face an implementation problem. You probably already sense what I’m about to say. It takes a while to figure out how to use any new technology. It took time for me to learn how to use the internet, email, social media and Zoom, but when you examine the daily drumbeat of life (at least for me as a journalist), there is now an imperative to deploy the (undoubtedly huge) benefits of ChatGPT5.2, which is a little different from ChatGPT4.0 or 3.0 and will undoubtedly be different from 6.0 and its successors, not to mention dozens of peripheral developments.
With previous disruptions — the printing press and so on — there were dips in growth (not to mention social convulsions) during the adoption phase. These were followed by a boom as societies integrated them into everyday life. Today we struggle to get through the adoption phase because the moment we have mastered one technology, a new one arrives. Of course, a company or state could stick to the previous iteration of any given technology, but it would run the risk of becoming Kodak in the age of digital photography or Blockbuster in the age of Netflix. In this ever more frantic dance between innovation and adoption, we glimpse a telling symptom of our age: exhaustion. We are forever seeking to catch up with an accelerating conveyor belt we ourselves set in train.
The other aspect of this predicament can be seen by coming back to Wilson. I described him as a polymath but I was using the term loosely. There is no such thing these days. As knowledge races forward, it is broadening dramatically. In the 18th century all knowledge was said to be contained in the Encyclopédie, a 17-volume compendium compiled by two French intellectuals. It was considered possible back then for a single individual to (as one later scribe put it) “hold all of western civilisation in their mind”. Today there are 100 million papers in the Web of Science and counting. Knowledge is no longer a small but manageable land mass; it is a vast and expanding set of islands — a gigantic Polynesia — where no one person can grasp a fraction of the overall terrain.
This creates a problem, since all policies pertaining to a modern, complex society are not about depth of knowledge but breadth; about seeing the whole rather than the parts. It is why I smile when I hear Reform UK say it is “obvious” how we should transform the state, as Elon Musk did on the other side of the pond. I agree that reform is necessary, but I dispute the idea that it is always easy. A sensible energy policy, for example, is not just about “knowledge” of fission technology, grids, planning, infrastructure, thermodynamics, procurement, geopolitics and more; it is about combining insights from all those areas, weighing trade-offs and making judgments wisely. As knowledge expands and splinters, this integrative wisdom becomes ever more elusive.
If I could have one wish granted, it would be for more people to see the world in these terms. Let me offer two ways such a perspective might help. First, as complexity grows, simplicity (and clarity) of vision becomes more important, not less so, particularly for a state. A leader who can articulate a shared goal or set of principles can galvanise people to co-ordinate in their millions. Think of Thatcher or Attlee: different visions, but both implanted a sense of where we were going and how we could work together to get there. We think of complexity and simplicity as in conflict but a deep synergy is possible. Wilson hinted at this with the metaphor of a group of ants: it is composed of simple units but embodies emergent intelligence at the level of the colony.
• How to think — the philosopher’s guide
Second, we need a more acute appreciation of the limits of our knowledge. This is an insight with an ancient pedigree but few wrote about it more eloquently than the philosopher Karl Popper, who said: “Our knowledge can only be finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite.” I believe this sentiment, widely held, could prove a vital antidote to our tendency to hubris, the delusion that we can solve our problems with yet more knowledge and technology when those are the very things subverting our collective understanding, as well as placing ever more systemic risks (I think of the harebrained race towards artificial general intelligence) beneath our feet.
I remain an optimist. I am looking forward to 2026. But let us stop pressing our noses up against the trees and seek out the forest, for that is how we will find the answers we crave. “I neither know nor think that I know,” said Socrates in Plato’s Apology. It is perhaps the central irony of modernity that as we incubate ever more technological wonders, and marvel at our own ingenuity, we are losing sight of this ageless wisdom.
Leave a Reply