The increasing use of artificial intelligence in the design and development of virtual worlds and virtual friends will make them more advanced, more personal, and more attuned to your likes and dislikes. They will allow you to live out your wildest fantasies in a matrix of your own creation, whereas back in the real world you are stuck in your apartment that you’ve been unable to find the energy to tidy for weeks.

Technology provides access to more power than our ancestors would have thought possible but does not guide us as to what to do with that power. Similarly, the market provides us with endless choices but does not tell us how to use these choices. And our liberal, individualist and faithless state gives us freedom, but provides no intellectual, moral or spiritual guidance for how to use that freedom.

It’s not only a question of who’s watching the watchmen, but also whether the watchmen and their watchers are in collusion with each other.

As machines increasingly do more of the work, and real-life relationships lose their allure, then the allegory of Plato’s Cave becomes real. A mass of people living inside, disconnected from those who live their lives outside, systematically unable or unwilling to participate in the competition of life because they cannot stand the unpredictability of reality.

The industrial age has transformed our material well-being, but these improvements have come at the cost of our beliefs: belief in our special place in the universe; belief in an omnipresent god; belief in country and community; belief in monogamy and marriage, and belief in our values. What, then, holds up the foundations of society when these beliefs finally fall away?

The future is less about management and the ability to recall information or taught skills, and more about the ability to use critical thinking, problem-solving, collaboration and adaptability.

The near future is going to be defined by the outcomes of a battle between those in control of the machines, and those controlled by them. Corporations have become richer and more powerful than countries, but without any form of societal contract or responsibility to citizens or communities. They are not the Quakers of old. Their loyalty to you starts and ends with your worth as a consumer and as a data provider.

The collapse of the sixth wave is likely to represent a fracturing of the socio-economic model and the end of the age of capitalism as we know it. It will be mortally wounded by the dual effects of overcoming the issue of scarcity and the demise of the relationship between productivity and employment.

The industrial model doesn’t work any more, yet many businesses still behave as if it does. They will have to wise up quick.

Consumers have stopped trusting institutions and started trusting strangers. Why? Because companies have an agenda, and their focus on constantly pushing products doesn’t inspire, doesn’t engage and doesn’t drive action.