The Shrinking Synthesis: Information-Technology Settlement Cycles and the 2037-2047 Window for AI's Institutional Reformation

Abstract

Every major information-propagation technology follows the same five-phase cycle: diffusion, capture, chaos, foundational institutional response, and consolidation. Settlement timesmeasured from the onset of mass propagation to the first major non-anticipatory institutional response-have compressed from 249 years (printing press, 1440-1689) through 46 years (telegraph, 1844-1890) to a tightly clustered band of 20-25 years across radio, television, and the internet. The plateau is consistent with a generational-floor hypothesis: institutional adaptation cannot compress below the time required for a cohort to grow up with the technology as normal. This paper identifies the compression pattern across five Western cases plus a non-Western illustration and two held-out applications of the coding rule, proposes a mechanism rooted in institutional accumulation and cohort replacement, and offers a historically grounded hypothesis for artificial intelligence's settlement timeline: first major institutional response in the 2037-2047 window, derived from the empirical clustering of the last three cycles and triangulated with cohort-replacement arithmetic for the AI Early-Formative-Partial-Exposure cohort whose plasticity windows encompass ChatGPT's 2022 onset. The prediction is a falsifiable structural extrapolation, not a quantitative forecast, with pre-registered conditions: settlement before 2037 disconfirms the floor mechanism (one generation from diffusion onset); settlement after 2049 disconfirms the compression thesis. AI's material differences-its dual nature as information and productivity technology, structural limits on classical capture under globalisation, and the novelty of anticipatory regulation-create prediction uncertainty. The horizon is policy-actionable: longer than electoral cycles but within a generation, it defines when coordinated institutional design is possible.

Keywords: information technology, institutional settlement, governance expansion, compression pattern, artificial intelligence, long-wave theory, AI governance, AI policy, futures studies, foresight, pre-registration, cohort replacement, generational cohorts, path dependence, institutional adaptation, techno-economic paradigm, ChatGPT, innovation studies, regulatory cycles, sociotechnical transitions

JEL Classification: O33, O38, N40