It’s hard for us to fathom exponential change – but our inability to do so could tear apart businesses, economies and the fabric of society
Below is a further exploration of “the rate of change” or “Future Shock” such as discussed in the post previous, this warning coming 50 years later, Certainly, change has been part of what humans have evolved to handle.
Until the “communications revolution” this was largely accomplished through new generations of humans being born into and subsuming into, the zeitgeist of their youthful years. That means of adjusting to change is of course still ongoing. There’s much talk about “generations” and Millenials do this or that, while Boomers do or think something different.
However, with exponential change, such as this Wired article discusses, generational change may well take too long to keep up. If so, then other ways of coping with change, other ways of understanding change, will be needed/ are needed now.
Kudos to Gary for the link, and here are some of his thoughts on the “exponential growth gap”;
The Exponential Age will transform economics forever | WIRED UKThis concept was the basis of a push 5-10 years back to fund a really aggressive, ever growing Guaranteed Minimum Income program that would be funded by a small tax on this exponential growth.
It sounded good to me at the time, but I was probably part of an infinitesimally small minority. The problem seems clear and has historical representation, but there has been virtually no action to implement solutions. As the Article asserts:
“Our institutions have an in-built tendency towards incrementalism.’
And incremental changes fail when confronting the disruption of exponential change. We as society will need to find a different path or face 50 years of social unrest until the system self-corrects or self destructs.
This article has a lot of useful perspectives and anecdotal evidence.
One area that also needs covering is the disconnect between biology and change. It is a truism that biology doesn’t change very quickly or very much in the case of humans, which we hear expressed as “we have the same biology as the caveman did”.
Could that be right in the age of CRISPR? We do have access to medical care to counter health threats, many orders of magnitude beyond what cavemen could do when health went awry. But the fundamental biological vulnerability to ill health continues today.
CRISPR is just at the blade part of the hockey stick as yet. But at some point, as it involves computation, it will be subject to the exponential age as well. At that point, similar to the singularity, all prediction is said to be impossible.
But today, the human condition contains the unconscious drives that paleolithic cultures had. For example, we have very strong fear emotions, and a very active fight or flight response that despite civilized environments takes over our beings somewhat unpredictably. We are tribal and can be sold a bar of soap by invoking our sex drive.
And all that is “some kind of anchor, for sure”.