We live in a world of unreality and dreams. To give up our imaginary position as the center, to renounce it, not only intellectually 'but in the imaginative part of our soul, that means to awaken to what is real and eternal, to see the true light and hear the true silence. A transformation then takes place at the very roots of our sensibility, in our immediate reception of sense impressions and psychological impressions. It is a transformation analogous to that which takes place in the dusk of evening on a road, where we suddenly discern as a tree what we had at first seen as a stooping man; or where we suddenly recognize as a rustling of leaves what we thought at first was whispering voices. We see the same colors; we hear the same sounds, but not in the same way.
-Simone Weil, Waiting for God
In an epoch where "AI transformation" dominates corporate discourse and every technological update promises to "transform" our lives, the deeper currents of what transformation actually means risk being submerged beneath the surface noise of modernity's ceaseless chatter. The ubiquity of the term—deployed with equal enthusiasm by management consultants and mystics, by data scientists and depth psychologists—signals both its profound relevance and its conceptual erosion. To rescue transformation from this semantic inflation, we must return to its etymological and phenomenological roots, examining not merely what transforms, but how form itself becomes the theater of becoming.
When psychologist Nick Haslam observed concept creep, he uncovered a cultural drift where our language—especially around harm, illness, and pathology—spills outward and downward, encompassing ever broader and subtler domains. The term, rooted in Haslam’s original 2016 formulation, explains how concepts like “bullying,” “trauma,” and “addiction” escaped their original boundaries, inflating not just in meaning, but in moral and social consequence. The result, Haslam argues, is ambivalent: our increased sensitivity to suffering gives voice to neglected pain, but also risks diluting meaningful distinctions and pathologizing the ordinary.
I see this linguistic inflation vivid in the business of technology, where “digital transformation” has evolved from marketing mantra to an institutional behemoth.1 It’s not surprising to see artificial intelligence being poised as the transformative engine here. And the story of our tradeoffs is written in the slippery slope of meaning: what we choose to call transformation reorients capital and psychology alike.
There is nothing constant in the universe, all ebb and flow, and every shape that is born bears in its womb the seeds of change.
—Ovid, Metamorphose
Against this backdrop, it is essential to clarify how transformation diverges from allied concepts like transition, revolution, and change. All these terms share conceptual ancestry, and the ways they are invoked shape the cognitive tools used to address new technological realities. For instance, a transition implies movement between two recognizable states—departure and arrival anchoring a passage through territory that, while perhaps unfamiliar, is nevertheless mapped. Revolution, meanwhile, carries the sense of cyclical upheaval, a dramatic but ultimately predictable turn of the wheel.
Transformation, by contrast, names the deeper process in which the very ground of being, or its form, is altered. What distinguishes transformation is its focus on form: the birth of a new silhouette in the landscape of mind, culture, or technology, rendering the prior paradigm incomplete or obsolete in retrospect. In AI, this matters keenly: conversations about alignment and interpretability hinge on whether we see AI as effecting surface transitions or as catalyzing transformations with new, unpredictable forms of intelligence or agency (as Linda Fan's research into cognitive tools subtly reminds us.) And the study and practice of form-led innovation—what we call design—becomes the lever at the product layer where technology meets lived reality. The sweet spot in the innovation cycle is that point where design translates raw technical capacity into meaningful, culturally resonant artifacts. A product only truly transforms when its form achieves a kind of cultural fittedness—when social, psychological, and technological forces converge in a shape that feels both surprising and inevitable.
To move from abstractions about fittedness into a more grounded, integrative inquiry, it’s worth turning to thinkers who operate at these thresholds—who have long asked how knowledge transforms us. Jill Purce, in The Mystic Spiral: Journey of the Soul, posed the question with rare clarity: "How does form come into being?"
Integrating philosophy and depth into our innovation workflows begins by listening—by noticing the traditions already steeped in these questions. What AI terms "mechanistic interpretability" or "alignment" are really iterations on an older, perennial theme: transformation, in both technique and implication. When we ask not just how to build, but how our inventions ripple through society’s hidden layers, we are, in effect, drawing on an ancestral well, repeating an ancient question in contemporary code: What new forms are possible here?
Their insights remind us that guiding the design of technological futures calls for more than assembling longer, more elaborate chains of logic; it demands discernment, the art of sensing what resonates, and an integrative knowledge that is by definition more complex, but also more useful, than sheer information. The quest for form that once belonged to artists, then philosophers and scientists, now finds a vital new context in AI research. If the research contributes to the transformation we once saw possible, it will discern patterns that, if not fully knowable, at least point toward meaning—not just technically correct systems, but ones fitted to the consequences and unknowns they bring into the world.
Yet, unlike their philosophical and artistic predecessors, contemporary AI researchers face a curious limitation—they lack the benefit of form as a stable object of study. The phenomena before them are wildly dynamic and shrouded in abstraction, forcing even the most technical workflows to circle back, again and again, to questions of human experience and biology. In the quest for safety and precision, tools multiply, languages become subtler, but the highest art of interpretation is not always found in layers of technical granularity. Instead, meaning often emerges when we widen our aperture: when we wonder not just “how does this system work,” but “does it deceive, does it dream, can it intend?”
Recent efforts to build “model biology” illustrate the point: driven by biological metaphors, the research field seeks to track emergent behaviors and desires within AI systems. Yet, even these frameworks can reproduce their own limitations, returning us to the familiar complexities of “the human.” If we take one step further—beyond the constraints of biological models—the door opens to psychological frameworks drawn from spiritual and traditional knowledge. Here is where the next integration lies: not only in simulating the mechanics of life, but in drawing on the full spectrum of techniques for understanding consciousness, behavior, and meaning. By listening to the wisdom traditions—those long practiced in tracing the consequences of the unknown—AI research might better integrate technical findings into a broader, more humane context, surfacing new forms of insight and intervention that technical modeling alone cannot reach.
The challenge before AI research is not only technical, but fundamentally philosophical: to wrestle with the emergence of meaning in domains where "form" is not given, but must be inferred, constructed, and continually negotiated.
Given the vantage architectural tradition brings to questions of transformation, Lewis Mumford stands as a powerful example of how returning to the roots of knowledge traditions can illuminate adjacent possibles. From his perch as The New Yorker’s architectural critic for thirty years, Mumford defined a sweeping vision for urban renewal that traced the deep interplay of technology, culture, and the built environment, always insisting that transformation is not a pursuit of relentless novelty but a creative reengagement with the energies and insights of the past.
One cannot help but wonder why our modern education system refuses to produce another Mumford—proof that it was at one time still possible to harmonize vocation with the ancient Greek concept for education, paideia, which is not instruction in the modern sense, but the slow, patient unfolding of form—a subtle choreography of living as a “larger process of converting facts into values, processes into purposes, hopes and plans into consummations.”
And yet, in a society where ignorance and privilege so often conspire against genuine development, we encounter resistance not merely in politics, but in the very way cultures nourish or stunt their own possibilities. The truly attuned intellectual practice—one that draws as much from the right hemisphere’s creative symphony as from the left’s analytic order—creates, in its perpetual composition, a living music. It is an art and a faith that belongs to all—a shared, evolving capacity for insight that dignifies, clarifies, and binds; not the property of specialists, but a general art of being human, confirmed only in the recognition of others who have also risked such seeing.
The friction Mumford describes—between narrow, static, life-divorced abstractions and the generative organization of thought within community—is not just political, but touches the heart of how cultures see and shape their own transformation. True insight is subjective yet shared; it is the shock of recognition in another’s lucidity, the “faith” born of recurrent confirmation in the labors and discoveries of the same kind of living thought. There are no specialists in being human. It is a general art.
So we stand on the brink of a new age: the age of an open world and a self capable of playing its part in that larger sphere. An age of renewal, when work and leisure and learning and love will unite to produce a fresh form for every stage of life, and a higher trajectory for life as a whole. ... No mere quarrying of stones from [the past’s] now-dilapidated structures will provide material for building the fabric of world culture. ... No less important than the past forces that drive men on are the new forms, dimly emerging in man's unconscious, that begin to beckon him and hold before him the promise of creativity; a life that will not be at the mercy of chance or fettered to irrelevant necessities. ... In carrying man's self-transformation to this further stage, world culture may bring about a fresh release of spiritual energy that will unveil new potentialities, no more visible in the human self today than radium was in the physical world a century ago, though always present. ... For who can set bounds to man's emergence or to his power of surpassing his provisional achievements? So far we have found no limits to the imagination nor yet to the sources on which it may draw. Every goal man reaches provides a new starting point, and the sum of all man's days is just a beginning.
-Lewis Mumford, The Transformations of Man
It is fitting, then, to turn to the architect as our interpreter of transformation at scale—none more provocative than Rem Koolhaas, whose philosophy reframes urban metamorphosis. For Koolhaas, the city is a reservoir of latent capacity—a living field where dormant desires and unrealized possibilities continually press toward new expression.
I have increasingly found that the architectural imagination offers a crucial corrective to technological determinism. Where Silicon Valley narratives of AI transformation typically assume that new tools will automatically generate new forms of social organization, Koolhaas suggests that transformation requires patient attention to existing patterns, desires, and capacities. The city transforms by creating conditions within which its own latent possibilities can unfold. Should technologists choose to carry out the craft of transformation as great architects do, they would do well to see AI transformation as necessarily involving discovery of how these new tools might activate dormant human capacities rather than simply substituting artificial processes for human ones.
So, if we have rightly insisted on anchoring the transformation concept to knowledge and operative traditions, it is time now to return to first principles and look towards those ancient roots where transformation was embodied in practice. Long before we inherited the language of digital or civic innovation, change began in the shimmering tension between form, matter, and something more elusive—the breath that animates both. While architecture sketches the grammar of form and science decodes rules for matter, what lingers just beyond the reach of blueprints and formulas is the quietly essential, too often neglected, dimension. Alchemists, in their luminous secrecy, never separated the transformation of metals from the transformation of selves. Their map leads us inward, calling for a reckoning with the hidden engine of transformation so often left underexplored in our age—spirit.
The video “Birth of a Flower” (1910) by F. Percy Smith offers a cinematic reflection on these questions, tracing transformation as an animation of the invisible spiral of becoming, where form emerges through the subtle dance of energy and time.
The oldest work is always beginning anew—a map forever inked not just in longing and imagination, but in the necessary descents the soul must risk to become more itself. To truly understand transformation, we must, as all wisdom traditions advise, step willingly into that ambiguous chamber where mystery and possibility tangle, inviting spirit—wild, intact, indefinable—into our inquiry once again.
Contemporary depth psychology, particularly in the tradition inaugurated by Jung and developed by figures like Erich Neumann, reveals that transformation is never a seamless ascent toward unity. Rather, it unfolds in the psyche’s embrace of its own multiplicity—its quarrels, contradictions, and prolific self-surprises. True change, Neumann reminds us, springs not from the vanquishing of inner conflict, but from the fertile tension it sustains: the unintegrated factors are not only a cause for alarm; they are also the source of transformation. Neumann's insight that most transformations are partial—affecting "ego and consciousness more than the total personality"—illuminates why the promise of technological transformation so often disappoints. True creative transformation occurs when "change within consciousness constellates and interacts with the depths of the unconscious," creating what he describes as "a continuous dialectical flow, new patterns constellating in psyche and world, ego and collective, self and other". And therein lies the necessary humility for a culture’s work: real transformation does not remain in the solitary domain of the self but blooms in the whole ecological field—a ceaseless dialectic, a choreography of ego and collective, self and other, consciousness and world.
When unconscious content erupts into daylight, spiritual intelligence adapts—weaving disruption into the ongoing story of self and culture. Transformation is rarely programmatic; it arrives as crisis, inspiration, or what Woolf named "gifts wrapped in darkness." Societies with sturdy rituals and living myths absorb such upheaval; technological cultures, devoted to stability and control, tend to mistake it for alien invasion rather than possibility.
When every software update is heralded as transformative, we lose the capacity to recognize—let alone navigate—the genuinely transformative potentials that our moment contains.
To preserve the art of shaping ourselves amid artifacts and algorithms, it becomes vital to reclaim the quiet crafts of transformation: attentive seeing, patient wonder, the integration of inner multiplicity and outer event. Genuine metamorphosis requires a literacy of transformation—a capacity to discern the difference between mere rearrangement and the irruption of new form.
This wisdom, subtle and perennial, is not the province of vanished civilizations or the exclusive incense of ascetics and poets. It is stitched into the patterned memory of our cultures, inscribed in psychology’s shadowed depths, renewed in every creative risk and luminous contemplation—present, if only we are willing to attend. To recover the literary and spiritual fullness of transformation is to remember that we are not passengers in deterministic systems, but artists and midwives and stewards, summoned again and again to shape worlds worthy of our deepest aspirations. Philosophers like Ullmann-Margalit and L.A. Paul remind us: there are events that redraw the architecture of being, remaking desire and self-knowledge from the inside out. True transformation confronts us with the limits of prediction and the birth of forms we could not anticipate.
If “the age of transformation” is to mean anything beyond branding, it will be because we choose, again and again, to practice this difficult art—making the internal revolution an ongoing act.
When every software patch is branded “transformative,” we risk forgetting what true metamorphosis feels like. To remain shapers of ourselves in this era of infinite updates, we must reclaim the quiet arts of transformation: wonder without calculation, the attentive seeing that lives beneath surface novelty, the integration that makes chaos generative. The spiral of real change—neither nostalgia nor trendy disruption—beckons us to cultivate a literacy for what is genuine: to tell rearrangement from authentic creation, permutation from the first trembling of a new form.
It is common to ask, in our age of fleeting upgrades, what is authentic? The artists do not leave us guessing. Not so long ago, Frédéric Back’s luminous film “The Man Who Planted Trees” offered an answer—a solitary shepherd, Elzéard Bouffier, quietly and patiently restoring a barren valley through acts of persistent stewardship, so that over decades, the land and its people blossom anew. Bouffier is fiction, but the story’s truth is enduring: transformation unfolds as an ongoing, participatory act—a way of knowing that we can choose to be in the spiral of being and doing, self and world, until even the deserts are green with possibility.
This guides our experiment in the Consorvia Meaning Lab this week—a multidisciplinary inquiry into transformation’s many faces. Share your thoughts by pinning inspirations or examples on Are.na and share your interest in joining Meaning Lab this Thursday.
In 2025 alone, the digital transformation market is valued at approximately $1.5 trillion, with forecasts projecting it to soar to over $10 trillion by 2034.