The World is Speeding Up 🌎⚡
Linear and exponential mindsets.
The earth is speeding up! And not just in the literal sense.
You know perception is a strange thing… Depending on where you stand, everything is relative.
In reality of course, there is a definite truth who’s fullness regularly alludes us. It’s outside the scope of our awareness or understanding. As the saying goes:
You don’t know what you don’t know.
This is why when we do experience something foreign, our sense of time slows down. Our mind tells us, “Hey this is important, pay attention”. It’s the same reason time seems to speed up the older you get.
You stop doing new things. So right about now you might be thinking
“okay that’s cool and all but what does that have to do with exponential & converging technology?”
Put simply, it has to do with our understanding of the past and our perception of the future.
A Linear Mindset
For most of human history, progress happened at a linear pace. It’s only recently that change started accelerating.
And it’s these gentle reminders that help us appreciate our time in history all the more.
To really get a grip on the past we have to start in prehistory, -before recorded history.
As a good starting point, the fossil record suggests that the first anatomically modern humans didn’t emerge until about 200,000 years ago. From then up until about 12,000 years ago our ancestors spent their time as hunters and gathers.
Everything changed though with the first agricultural revolution.
Food was more predictable.
As a result the population boomed, personal property became a thing, and slowly we had more time to explore out of curiosity instead of survival.
And we explored more than just our surroundings. We explored ourselves.
Fast forward past the rise and fall of ancient civilizations like Mesopotamia, Babylon, Egypt, India, Crete, and China, and we arrive at “the greatest civilization that ever was”, when Augustus Caesar declared himself Emperor of Rome in 31 BC.
The greatest gift the Romans ever gave to the world was a model society.
Their empire lasted so long and spread so vast because they were great! Generations of leaders defined modern public infrastructure and challenged the nature of good governance in public discourse.
The fall of Rome around 500 AD left the world without a powerful central authority for almost a thousand years. Warring kingdoms and feudalism left little room for large scale cooperation.
Fast forward again to the peak of the British Empire and the rise of the Industrial Revolution, around the early 1800’s.
It’s here, only in the last 200 years, that we begin to really see the world speeding up thanks to technology.
All this history is almost incomprehensible. Compared to today, change happened at a snails pace.
Change Accelerates
Its here, in the 1800s, (just 200 years ago!) change started to accelerate.
The stagecoach, traveling a measly 6 mph, took four weeks to go from New York to Chicago.
The advent of trains in the mid 1850’s brought that down to four days. And 100 years later, with the commercialization of airlines, that shrunk from four days to four hours.
In a similar way, communication went from the first stagecoach drawn postal service, to the telegraph in 1844, to the telephone in 1876.
Television didn’t really gain popularity until a few years after World War II in the late 1940’s. And the internet began as a government project in 1958 as a response to the Soviet’s Sputnik.
The early internet was just four computers, called the Arpanet. We still wouldn’t have broad commercial access until the mid 1990’s.
Exponential Mindset
Thirty years later and we arrive at the edge of history, in the present moment.
And so an exponential mindset is about recognizing that we’ve only just recently come into a world where dramatic change happens not over a lifetime, or even a decade or a year, but months.
I don’t think we’ve fully grasped just how quickly the world is about to change. A good example of exponential growth in practice is the human genome project.
The Human Genome Project (HGP) was the international, collaborative research program whose goal was the complete mapping and understanding of all the genes of human beings. All our genes together are known as our "genome."
When the project was just kicking off in 1990, Ray Kurzweil, the head engineer at Google, recounted his perspective in an interview with Wired magazine a decade after its completion:
Halfway through the Human Genome Project, 1 percent of the genome had been collected after seven years. So mainstream critics said, "I told you this wasn't gonna work. You're at seven years, 1 percent; it's going to take 700 years just like we said." My reaction at the time was: "Wow we finished 1 percent? We're almost done." Because 1 percent is only seven doublings from 100 percent. It had been doubling every year. Indeed, that continued. The project was finished seven years later. That's continued since the end of the genome project---that first genome cost a billion dollars and we're now down to $1,000.
What the mainstream assumed was that progress happens at a linear pace.
Exponential Change in a Single Lifetime
Thanks to the internet and the exponential acceleration discovered by Moore’s Law, the information age is carrying us into uncharted territory.
The world is sophisticated and complex and we are standing on a precipice. There’s a world of possibility and uncertainty.
Nearly all new age technologies follow this model of exponential acceleration.
What kind of future are you hoping for?
Will we finally put an end to world hunger, homelessness, poverty? Will we colonize the moon and mars? Will we “cure” aging, and merge with a brain computer interface?
William Gibson, an American-Canadian speculative fiction writer widely credited with pioneering the science fiction subgenre known as cyberpunk, has a great quote on this concept.
“The future is already here it is just unevenly distributed”
While I think this is an accurate quote, I want to steer attention away from what is out of our control, to what’s within our control.
Today, more than ever before, transparency and accountability matters, -especially in leadership.
Artificial Intelligence is just one exponential technology expected to change the future of society forever. It’s a topic that shouldn’t be left to any single group of individuals because it influences all of us.
That’s why it’s becoming of everyone to understand what it is, how it works, and how it’s being used today.
I want to leave you with a few powerful quotes on Artificial Intelligence to highlight just how quickly change is coming.
A Selection of Famous Quotes on Artificial Intelligence
The Significance of AI
“AI is one of the most important things humanity is working on. It is more profound than, I dunno, electricity or fire.”
-Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google
“Artificial intelligence will reach human levels by around 2029. Follow that out further to, say, 2045, we will have multiplied the intelligence, the human biological machine intelligence of our civilization a billion-fold.”
— Ray Kurzweil, American inventor and Futurist, Director of Engineering at Google
“Software is eating the world, but AI is going to eat software.”
— Jensen Huang, Taiwanese-American billionaire businessman and electrical engineer, CEO of Nvidia
The Dangers of AI
“I don’t want to really scare you, but it was alarming how many people I talked to who are highly placed people in AI who have retreats that are sort of ‘bug out’ houses, to which they could flee if it all hits the fan.”
— James Barrat, author of Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era, told the Washington Post
“AI will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there’ll be great companies.”
— Sam Altman, American entrepreneur, investor, programmer, and CEO of OpenAI and the former president of Y Combinator
“The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race….It would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever increasing rate. Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete, and would be superseded.”
— Stephen Hawking told the BBC
“If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality.”
— Stephen Hawking, during a Reddit AMA in 2016
“People are spending way too much time thinking about climate change, way too little thinking about AI.”
— Peter Thiel, German-American billionaire entrepreneur and venture capitalist. Co-founder of PayPal, Palantir Technologies, and Founders Fund
“I’m increasingly inclined to think that there should be some regulatory oversight, maybe at the national and international level, just to make sure that we don’t do something very foolish. I mean with artificial intelligence we’re summoning the demon.”
— Elon Musk warned at MIT’s AeroAstro Centennial Symposium
Automation and AI
“If AI can help humans become better chess players, it stands to reason that it can help us become better pilots, better doctors, better judges, better teachers.”
― Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future
“Ultimately, AIs will dematerialize, demonetize and democratize all of these services, dramatically improving the quality of life for 8 billion people, pushing us closer towards a world of abundance.”
― Peter Diamandis, Greek American engineer, physician, and entrepreneur
“The impending destruction of jobs due to automation and AI technologies is definitely increasing the need for — and speed at which — we have to implement big solutions, such as a universal basic income.”
― Andrew Yang, American Entrepreneur, Philanthropist, and former Presidential Candidate
“We have seen AI providing conversation and comfort to the lonely; we have also seen AI engaging in racial discrimination. Yet the biggest harm that AI is likely to do to individuals in the short term is job displacement, as the amount of work we can automate with AI is vastly larger than before. As leaders, it is incumbent on all of us to make sure we are building a world in which every individual has an opportunity to thrive.”
— Andrew Ng, Co-founder and lead of Google Brain