The Accelerating Future

As Social Media funnels us into partisan echo chambers, climate change takes its toll, technology eliminates privacy, and authoritarian regimes rise around the world on waves of self-centered populism, the situation looks grim. 

Will things ever get any better? Or are we on a downward slope to unprecedented devastation? 

It depends on your perspective. Certainly, if a time traveler went back to 1885 with the news that today, some 1.25 million people would die each year in car accidents, it would have seemed like we were delivering the news of a dystopian nightmare. Yet most people feel empowered by their access to a personal vehicle, and global news is not dominated by the carnage on the roads.

We have selective attention when it comes to disgruntlement and despair. Let’s take a look at the big picture.

We are now 7.7 billion people who have overcome predictions of population doom while at the same driving down the level of severe poverty world-wide. Health and life expectancy are improving almost everywhere. A human alive today has less probability of being killed in a violent conflict than at any point in our past.

Less than 500 years ago it was heresy to deny the Earth was the center of the universe. The telescope had yet to be invented. The Gregorian calendar we use today was just being developed. There were no antibiotics. Only 20% of adult males could sign their names. Most women were neither educated nor allowed in the professions, and the industrial revolution and the elimination of slavery were centuries yet to come.

500 years! Even those who believe the world is only 6,000 years old would be hard pressed not to acknowledge an accelerating curve of advances focused into less than 10% of history. For the rest of us, it’s all happened in a vanishingly small one tenth of one percent of our species’ time on Earth.

Something has been unleashed, some spark ignited that all the civilizations, religions, and philosophies of previous generations could not engender. It could be argued that things really took off during Enlightenment period of the Eighteenth Century, only 300 years past. 

Reason. Numbers. The empirical and scientific approach have come to dominate the world to such a degree that even those who would push us back into superstition have found they must fight numbers with numbers, theories with theories, piling alternative facts on top of real ones to obscure the value of observation and rational thinking.

Whatever it is, the genie is out of the bottle, and the pace of change is only accelerating. This brings with it many problems: the displacement of workers, vast inequality in wealth distribution, dangerous levels of pollution, extinctions, and climate disruption, along with economic and territorial instabilities that may yet lead to weakened democracies, emboldened authoritarians, and war. 

These are serious problems. Huge problems. But when push comes to shove, humans are great at solving such challenges. It’s not always pretty. Sometimes there are halting and intermediate steps, even backward slides that cost us dearly, yet today our advances are accelerating, indeed the rate of change of acceleration itself may be increasing.

Even so, we are still creatures of emotion, drive by greed, intolerance, and superstition. A few centuries cannot change the fact that we are only smidgen of logic bound up in a muscular set of emotions. And perhaps that’s why it’s so easy to despair, and to be frightened by the often-dramatic changes that can now be experienced in a single lifetime.

Change can be uncomfortable, dangerous, and daunting. Admittedly, whatever problem concerns us today, tomorrow’s solutions will only cause more complications and worry down the road. Yet we go on. We go on such that the next 500 years will separate us from our progeny more dramatically than the Hubble Space Telescope separates us from Galileo’s first glimpse of the magnified moon.

Quantum computing, carbon sequestration, space flight, genetic and biological engineering, nano-technology, artificial intelligence, the Internet-of-Things, and additive manufacturing are a few of the developments on the horizon of global change. There are a dozen more under development today, for which we have no names, but which the next generation will take for granted when they come.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that technology and science will save us. Technology is just a tool generating phenomenon, and we are the universe’s master tool users. If the ocean rises, and we find that inconvenient, and we have a tool to change it, we will. If the insects die off and we find we need them, we’ll make more. While it may sound like I’m being flippant or disregarding the great damage we can do, I am instead convinced that the forces of enlightenment, reason, and humane values unleashed in the last half millennium are global in scale and literally Earth changing in power. They are also enormously beneficial to our species and to individual lives everywhere.

If we are dissatisfied with the state of things and would strive for even greater freedoms, a more peaceful world, a literate and enlightened populace, and…to be sure, safer roads, it could only make the next 500 years even more amazing.

With hope and humility in the face of these tremendous historical forces, we wish the future Godspeed.