A language forwhat comes after AGI.

The human capacity to originate a direction, make a consequential choice, and remain answerable for what follows.

The design of durable conditions that shape what people can perceive, choose, and become within them.

The finite human act of deciding what receives reality long enough to be perceived, understood, and cared for.

The open field in which sensations, patterns, relationships, and possibilities become available to notice.

The narrow passage that limits the flow of an entire system, regardless of how much capacity exists elsewhere.

The shape of an instruction — how tightly it constrains, along which axes, and where it deliberately leaves room.

The commitment to hold the flourishing and vulnerability of what we make inside the act of making it.

The creation of something none of the participants could have fully imagined before encountering one another.

A shared field of resources and possibilities sustained through collective rules, contribution, and care.

A sufficiently shared decision that allows collective movement while making disagreement and revision remain visible.

The ongoing power to understand, influence, accept, refuse, and later revise one’s participation.

Sustained, non-instrumental attention that allows a situation to reveal more than the first answer available.

The condition of sharing a historical present with people who experience its time, urgency, and possibilities differently.

The arrangement of interdependent actions so that many capabilities can move coherently toward a shared direction.

The passage by which a possibility is selected, shaped, and released into a world where it can have consequences.

The caring selection and arrangement of abundance so that a meaningful world becomes perceptible.

The deliberate transfer of execution to a person, team or machine while keeping answerability for the result — knowing what to hand over, and what must never leave your hands.

The practice of turning an intention into conditions that other people can perceive, use, question, and inhabit.

The capacity to say what should exist — originating an intention, committing it to a form the work can act on, and remaining answerable for the choice.

A model of the human–machine relation in which the human holds intent and the machine holds capability, and neither side is diminished.

The posture of attending to a field of possible outcomes and choosing among them, as distinct from labouring over a single artifact.

The cultivated ability to perceive consequential differences and choose without reducing judgment to a score.

The presence of meaningful difference within a group, system, culture, or field of possibility.

The arrival of patterns and capacities that arise through relation and cannot be understood by inspecting isolated parts.

A deliberately invented form that reveals truths, rehearses alternatives, and makes consequences available to experience.

The lived capacity to form purposes, refuse imposed directions, and participate in shaping the conditions of one’s life.

A deliberate resistance that protects attention, judgment, consent, or consequence from disappearing into speed.

The abilities said to matter for work that does not yet exist — and why this canon trains capacities instead: a skill fits a known task landscape; a capacity holds when the landscape moves.

The dynamic capacity of a person, community, or system to adapt, relate, recover, and pursue meaningful life.

The phrase has recurred independently for twenty years, from a 2006 Fortune essay to a 2025 consultancy report, without ever receiving a definition.

A disciplined relationship to an unfinished future that keeps meaningful action possible without pretending success is guaranteed.

The design of conditions in which unfamiliar people, ideas, and futures can enter without being forced into sameness.

Both the unfinished human species and the ethical quality of recognising every person as more than a function, profile, or resource.

A portable organisation of meaning that changes what can be perceived, connected, or attempted.

The human capacity to experience what is absent and to let that absence reorganise what becomes possible in the present.

An adjacent term, introduced in the early 1990s and popularised from 2007, describing a period rather than an economic mechanism.

The test of a future from inside it: whether people can live, relate, adapt, and remain human within what has been imagined.

A consciously held direction that gives choices coherence while remaining open to discovery and revision.

The accountable act of deciding what fits the situation when evidence, rules, and generated options cannot decide by themselves.

The continuing atlas of plates that accompanies this work — visual arguments made in parallel with the prose rather than illustrations of it.

The continuous work of keeping a world usable, trustworthy, and capable of change after the excitement of creation has passed.

The practice of noticing present experience clearly enough to interrupt automatic reaction and recover the freedom to choose.

A learned orientation that determines what we notice, what we believe can change, and how we respond when the world resists us.

A felt sense of where one stands, what matters, and which direction remains meaningful within a changing field.

A meaningful recurrence through which otherwise separate events become recognisable as part of the same form.

A protected mode of exploration in which possibilities can be tried, transformed, and abandoned before they become obligations.

The condition in which genuinely different ways of knowing, living, and imagining remain present without being collapsed into one centre.

A future that is neither prediction nor fantasy, but sufficiently coherent to invite present choice and collective testing.

A relationship in which receiving creates an obligation to return value, care, recognition, or future possibility.

The active decision not to realise a possible action when doing so would violate a value, relation, or future worth protecting.

The embodied testing of a possible future before full commitment, so that imagination can encounter consequence and revise itself.

The work of restoring function, trust, and possibility after damage while learning from the form of the break.

The felt recognition that an artifact or possibility connects with something already alive in a person or community.

The obligation to remain answerable for the futures our choices help make real, including effects we did not intend.

A collective discipline for making reliable knowledge through observation, explanation, testing, criticism, and revision.

The capacity to perceive one’s own motives, assumptions, limits, and effects while remaining able to revise them.

The collective formation of a workable understanding when reality is changing faster than existing categories can explain it.

The recognition that every act of knowing and imagining begins from a particular body, history, place, and relation.

The long-horizon practice of holding a capability, commons, or institution in trust for lives beyond one’s immediate use.

The relatively durable arrangement of relations that determines how a system holds together and where change can travel.

The fine-grained quality that makes an experience feel lived, situated, and irreducible to its outline.

The step in a process that limits everything downstream of it. In the imagination economy, that step is specification rather than execution.

Working by generating many candidates and choosing among them, rather than by producing one artifact and refining it.

The fall of the marginal cost of producing a competent artifact from significant to approximately nothing, between roughly 2022 and 2026.

Specificity of articulation, comparative judgement, reference fluency, constraint design and iteration discipline.

The six-move working protocol for generative systems — Ground, Articulate, Run, Discern, Edit, Nurture — each move countering a documented failure mode of human–AI collaboration.

The economy that begins once the cost of producing an artifact falls to near zero and the binding constraint moves to knowing what should be made.

The threshold at which a maker recognises a candidate as the thing they meant, rather than merely as an acceptable result.

The charged interval where one order has loosened but the next has not yet become ordinary.

The responsible carrying of meaning between languages, disciplines, experiences, or forms without pretending nothing changes in transit.

The honest condition of acting when relevant futures, consequences, and even categories remain unresolved.

The significance a person or community recognises in something—and the difference that significance makes to choice.

A coherent image of a desirable direction that helps people organise action without pretending the future is already known.

The receptive astonishment that interrupts familiarity and makes reality available for fresh attention.

A shared horizon of meaning within which things, actions, relationships, and futures become intelligible.

The practice of making a possible future coherent enough to explore from within, critique together, and begin to construct.

The emergence of a form that becomes possible through encounter with radical difference rather than replication of the familiar.

An orientation of curiosity and welcome toward what is foreign, unfamiliar, or outside one’s inherited frame.

A felt orientation toward a life or world that is absent but already powerful enough to reorganise the present.

The intelligent act of giving way to reality, another perspective, or an emerging form without surrendering responsibility.

The dominant atmosphere of assumptions, anxieties, desires, and possibilities through which an era interprets itself.

The threshold at which a cost, delay, or distance becomes negligible enough to reorganise behaviour—even when it never literally disappears.