Hello, ladies and gents, welcome to Luscid!
Today we'll start with a simple thought experiment.
Imagine taking a time machine back to the year 1750—a time when electricity hasn't
been introduced yet, long-distance communication took months, and horses were the main transport.
When you get there, you meet a random fellow, bring him to 2017,
walk him around and watch his reaction.
It's hard to imagine what it would be like for him to see shiny capsules whizzing with
160 km/h, talk to people who had been on the other side of the ocean earlier that day,
and capture real-life images with the magical rectangles in our pockets.
Then imagine bringing out the heavy artillery like explaining the Internet, the GPS or the
Quantum field theory.
Our new friend would be so surprised and mind blown by the progress humanity has achieved
that he might actually die of shock.
But here's the interesting thing—let's assume our friend survives the future shock
and decides to try the same thing.
He'd take the time machine, go back the same distance, get someone from around the
year 1500, bring him to his time, and show him around.
And the 1500 guy would be surprised by a lot of things—but he wouldn't die because
while the 16th and 18th centuries were very different, they were much less different than
the 18th and the 21st.
If our new friend wants to accomplish the same result, he'd have to go much farther
back—maybe all the way back to about 12,000 BC, before the First Agricultural Revolution
gave rise to the first cities and to the concept of civilization.
If someone from a purely hunter-gatherer world saw the vast human empires of the 18th century
with their monumental churches, ocean-crossing ships
and the enormous amount of generated knowledge - he'd probably die.
Two years ago Tim Urban - the WaitButWhy blogger, explored this unusual sci-fi plotline to illustrate
one common mistake that many people make when contemplating the level of progress humanity
is going to achieve in the future – thinking of it in straight lines.
Let me show you what I mean.
If I ask you, to make an educated guess about what's going to happen in 30 years you'll
probably look back to the progress of the previous 3 decades as an indicator.
This would be the same mistake our 1750 guy made when he got someone from the 16th century
and expected to blow his mind as much as his own was blown going the same distance ahead.
In order to think about the future correctly, we need to imagine things moving at a much
faster rate than they're moving now.
This pattern—human progress moving quicker and quicker as time goes on—is what futurist
Ray Kurzweil calls the Law of Accelerating Returns.
This happens because more advanced societies have the know-how and the technology to progress
at a faster rate than less advanced societies.
Kurzweil actually suggests that the progress of the entire 20th century happened between
the years 2000 and 2014 and that another 20th century's worth of progress will happen
by 2021.
But what's really mind-bending is his prediction that till the end of the 21st century we will
achieve 1,000 times the progress of the 20th century.
If you're having trouble grasping this, it's not your fault.
Decades of research in cognitive psychology show that the human mind struggles to understand
nonlinear relationships.
And it's not hard to see why.
For the vast majority of human existence, it was safe to assume that the world in which
you were born would look pretty much the same as the one in which you are going to die.
Actually not much change occurred even between generations: we used pretty much the same
tools, our menu didn't change a lot, life was not so different as a whole.
As a result, we've developed an intuitive outlook of the future as moving in a straight line –
steadily and slowly.
But if we want our predictions about the future to be more accurate we need to think about it
exponentially.
Exponential thinking is still a relatively unknown concept.
It is not just about thinking big; it is about the steps from small to big.
Here's another way to think about it: Imagine you are walking down a road taking steps a
meter in length.
If you take 30 linear steps, you'd end up 30 meters away from where you've started.
But, setting anatomy aside, if someone asks you to take 30 exponential steps
(one, two, four, eight, sixteen meters, and so on),
where would you end up?
The answer is a billion meters away, a distance equal to twenty-six trips around the planet.
Pretty amazing, right?
Now, if you consider the implications of exponential growth in relation to the progress of humanity,
it creates a very different picture of the future; a picture that our intuition struggles
to understand.
Problems that may seem intractable now could become eminently solvable in the near future.
Soon, things which we could barely have imagined decades ago might be just around the corner.
So, yes, we should expect mind-blowing changes in the near future!
But the bigger question here is: are we ready for them?
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