2024 Belgrade : University, Faculty of Education Abstract: With the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, humanity faced numerous new challenges. The fight against the spread of the SARS–CoV–2 virus and the disease caused by it led towards an urgent response at the national and global levels, in the situation when both the virus and the disease were new, formerly unknown. The virus is a subject of biological science, but the pandemic is a social phenomenon and, therefore, its sociological aspect must also be explored. Global social circumstances were the key ones in making it possible for COVID-19 to become a disease with the most rapid pandemic spread in the history of medicine. During the pandemic, both scientists and politicians and public figures in general introduced the term “new normality”. It seemed that the pandemic had reshaped our everyday life to such an extent that it would no longer be the same, that the “new normal” would prevail as a new life concept of the people on the planet. The aim of the research is to explore theoretically the concept of the “new normal”. Is it an ideological concept which should be achieved for the sake of fulfilling certain large capital interests or a necessity of facing the new virus for the purpose of preserving people’s lives and health? The results of the conducted research point out that the “new normal” was an ideological attempt of reshaping people’s everyday life, but not only by dictating certain stricter rules of behaviour, connected with a higher degree of control over human freedoms and over people’s behaviour, justified by the concern for people’s lives and health, which should definitely be taken into consideration, but only as the initial stage. What no one noticed on time, however, were two other elements of the “new normal”: geopolitical (and geoeconomic) reshaping of the world, in the whirlwind of war (first the Russian-Ukrainian war, and then the Palestinian-Israeli war) which practically immediately followed the pandemic crisis and, on the other hand, the beginning of the omnipresence of artificial intelligence (AI) in human lives. These are two most important elements of the “new normal” in which we are living today. https://phaidrabg.bg.ac.rs/o:35819 doi:10.18485/uf_edu_covid19.2024.2.ch29 cobiss:161651977 ISBN: 978-86-7849-343-0 info:eu-repo/semantics/bookPart Šuvaković, Uroš All rights reserved application/pdf 211572 bytes Education through the Covid-19 pandemic. [Vol. 2], [Socio-humanistic aspects] volume: 2 startpage: 772 endpage: 793 "New normal” – not what we expected eng Keywords: COVID-19 pandemic, “new normal”, rapid development of AI, Russian- Ukrainian war, Palestinian-Israeli war, sociological implications.