The Next Renaissance

Glossary

Part I—Technical Terms (A–Z)

Adoption gap

 The space between technological and societal thresholds. See also: Technological vs. Societal Thresholds.

AGI (Artificial General Intelligence)

 A hypothetical AI system that can understand, learn, and apply knowledge across most tasks at or beyond human level. In the book's framing, AGI is expected around 2030 and functions as the inflection behind the “Next Renaissance.” See also: foundation model, scaling laws.

AI agent/agentic AI

 Software that plans and executes multi‐step tasks toward a goal with varying autonomy (tool use, memory, self‐correction). Distinct from “copilots,” which remain user‐in‐the‐loop. See also: function calling, orchestration.

AI alignment

 Research and practices to ensure AI systems pursue goals consistent with human values and constraints (safety, reliability, controllability).

Ambient computing

 Computing that fades into the environment (wearables, voice, sensors) and works in natural language with minimal screens—often a stepping stone toward the Natural Language Operating System view.

API (Application Programming Interface)

 The programmatic interface apps and services use to talk to AI models and tools (e.g., for retrieval, function calls, or routing).

Attention (mechanism)

 The core operation in transformer models that lets them weight relationships between tokens to predict the next token.

BCI (Brain–Computer Interface)

 Hardware and software that read/write brain signals to control ...