“No man of sense, even if he is prosperous for the moment, will ever reckon with certainty on the future.”
~ Polybius, Histories (written between 160 – 146 BC)
Joel Bowman with today’s Note From the End of the World: Buenos Aires, Argentina...
When we left you last, we were reckoning on a theory of time: it’s speeding up.
Alas, we ran out of time to finish the thought! (Readers can get themselves up to speed, right on time, in Part I.)
We’ll pick up that thread in just a moment. But first, what’s the point of all this? Why bother thinking about such abstract concepts at all?
Isn’t there something more pressing, more immediate, au courant over which to cogitate?
Has POTUS dropped another “Truth bomb” on social media? Is the Iran War on/off again? Has the Empire crested the $40T debt summit? Have the forests all burned and the oceans all boiled?
And what happened to inflation figures and GDP measurements and consumer confidence indexes? Where’s “the meat”?
A little patience, if you would be so kind. At least some good things come to those who wait...
Besides, we’re teasing out a paradox, dear reader: the idea that the more we come to “know” – about our past, about the human condition, about the world around us – the more uncertain our future becomes.
But how could this be so? Conventional, post-Enlightenment wisdom assures us the opposite ought to be the case... that the more we refine our measuring tools, the more we apply cold, hard reason to the questions outstanding, the more easily we’ll be able to “peek around the corner.”
Surely with all our whizz-bang technology... our doubt-free “thought leaders”... our globalist gatherings and press corps. blatherings... we’re closer to “The Truth” than ever before, no?
But let us save that laughable conceit for the end of our little tale. Today, we pick up where we left off, hot on the heels of man’s marvelous technological adventure...
Old School Rock ‘n’ Roll
From the humble wheel, which probably got rolling in Mesopotamia (modern day Iraq) sometime around 3,500 BC... to iron smelting, for which we thank the Hittites, c. 1,800 BC... to the precursors to the modern day alphabet, courtesy of the Phoenicians, c. 1,200 BC...
We watched as man plodded along, dragging his simple tools and fractured languages around with him for centuries, sometimes millennia, before his best and brightest (or at least, most fecund) ideas began to catch on. Sometimes these ideas were spread by trade and commerce... other times by war and conquest... and often by pure chance.
Other times, they were simply lost along the way... see the The Baghdad Battery or the Antikythera mechanism or the Greek “Lycurgus Cup,” a dichroic glass artifact whose optical properties weren’t properly understood until modern science... for just a smattering of the ideas History “forgot.” (Our friends at Classical Wisdom have delved into these and other wonders. See more here.)
Indeed, in many ways, the record of History itself, as far as we may claim to “know” it at all, survives largely as a result of chance and contingency, much of it invisible to us. Consider, for example, that it is only because the population of Pompeii was so completely annihilated by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius (in 79 AD), that their history was preserved for us.
Call it “conservation through extermination.” Convenient for historians, perhaps... not so much for Pliny the Elder and his “fortune favors the bold” shipmates. Ah, but that’s another story, for another time...
Upstream to Mainstream
In any event, it was not until the Renaissance, in general, and Johannes Gutenberg’s moveable type printing press, in particular, when technology really began to reach escape velocity. Cue the Scientific Revolution (c. 1540–1700), the Age of Enlightenment (c. 1680–1800) and the Industrial Revolution (c. 1760–1850), and before you could say “a car in every garage,” Henry Ford’s automobile production plants are cranking out 2M new sets of wheels per year in the United States alone.
Mankind had come a long way since his original rock ‘n’ roll days, back in the cradle of civilization. And he was only just getting going...
From the mid-19th to the early 21st Century, technology underwent an acceleration so dramatic it became impossible to ignore, at least for anyone with eyes to see. Herewith, a pithy breakdown of some nifty breakthroughs. (Shown is the number of years it took for each technology to reach 25% of the US population, the so-called tipping point where a technology is said to safely “cross the chasm” into the mainstream)...
Electricity: 46 Years (1873 to 1919)
Automobile: 35 Years (1886 to 1921)
Radio: 31 Years (1920 to 1951)
Television: 26 Years (1926 to 1952)
Personal Computer: 16 Years (1975 to 1991)
The Internet: 7 Years (1991 to 1998)
Smartphones: 4 Years (2007 to 2011)
Faster than Light
This is a phenomenon economists, investors, policy wonks, and fringy newsletter scribblers sometimes call “adoption curve compression,” wherein the time from innovation to saturation... from lab to “fab!”... significantly shortens over time.
The “The Law of Accelerating Change,” as the futurist Ray Kurzweil described it, happens in part because each new technology is able to benefit from the previous technology in order to better “build itself.” Once man had fashioned the first wheel, the first iron tool, the first computer, etc., he could use it to help build a better, faster, more efficient wheel, iron tool, computer, etc.
In this way, the rate of technological advancement went from linear... to exponential.
Another contributing factor is the speed at which knowledge (not wisdom, mind you) can travel. In the ancient world, ideas spread as fast as men could physically carry them... about 3 miles/hour. By the industrial era, seated aboard trains and ships, he could manage perhaps 60 mph. And by the time he was surfing the web of fiber optic cables, man’s ideas (good, bad and ugly) could travel at the speed of light.
(Actually, it is potentially infinitely faster than that.. as a single piece of information can now travel from Point A to any number of destinations simultaneously, thereby collapsing the denominator of the speed equation from the very outset.)
All of which makes the arrival of Artificial Intelligence entirely unsurprising post factum… but next to impossible to have predicted ante hoc.
But is A.I. itself another Gutenberg moment… or a Mt. Vesuvius rumbling underfoot? And is there any way to know for sure?
More on all that, next time...
Stay tuned for your Notes From the End of the World...
Cheers,
Joel Bowman
I'm glad I'm older, 69. I feel for my kids and grandkids because they are clueless. Sadly they have no idea what's going on in the world. Or the past. I try to inform them, but they know everything because they carry a computer in their pockets. What's a parent to do?
Fast is one thing. Way too fast is another. By the time I understand the latest algorithm for marketing, it's already become yesterday's news. Where is this all taking us? Will we arrive before we can even figure it out? I better get back to mastering a slow hermit lifestyle. That's a speed I can handle.