“The future belongs to the curious.”
~ Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist (1890)
Joel Bowman with today’s Note From the End of the World: Buenos Aires, Argentina...
Where were we? Ah yes, running out of time!
For those following along, we’ve been musing of late on the idea that technology is speeding up... but that, contrary to popular thinking, this actually renders our future more uncertain, not less.
(See Parts I and II for the story so far...)
“But how could this be?” the cheerful newsfeeder puzzles aloud. “What about all our Big Tech Brainiacs and their gee-whizz do-dads? Surely we’re closer to ‘peeking around the corner’ than ever before, no?”
Look around you, dear reader. For all our high frequency traders and Wall Street wizards... our overpaid quants and ten-sigma sages... our academic eggheads and gum-flapping politicos...
... how many of them foresaw the Global Financial Crisis of 2008? Or the Global Pandemic Panic of 2020? Or the rise of the AI juggernaut in 2022-...?
Certainly not the dauntless captains high on the bridge... the Bernankes and Yellens, Trumps and Bidens, Faucis and Collins, et al. ... most of whom ought to be given a long walk off a short plank.
More on the necessary, inevitable failure of our political class in a moment. But first, let’s pick up the thread...
Whispers in the Wind
We’ve already seen how the rate of technological advancement is speeding up, a phenomenon sometimes referred to as “adoption curve compression.” From the wheel (which took millennia to span the known world)... to gunpowder (centuries)... to the automobile (decades)... to the smart phone (years)... to AI (months)... it’s no exaggeration to say that innovation now occurs in real time.
Partly, that’s a result of technology “standing on the shoulders of giants.” Recall that it was the futurist, Ray Kurzweil, who gave us the Law of Accelerating Change, whereby technological advancement is thought to speed up because each new breakthrough builds on the infrastructure already laid for it by the previous generation.
Eventually, one supposes, you end up with a train that lays its own track... or a 3D-printer that prints its own replacement (Theseus’s printer?)... or an algorithm that knows precisely how racist you are even before you notice the color of your thumbs-up emoji. The mind boggles.
This rapid acceletarion is also due to the evolving nature of the information ecosystem itself. In the Pre-Gutenberg Press era, when books were status ornaments of the landed gentry, copied out by candle-burning clergymen (themselves often illiterate), information moved at the pace, and with the fidelity, of a whisper in the wind.
Today, information travels beyond the speed of light, a proposition that was once deemed mathematically impossible... until simultaneity broke the velocity equation. That is to say, information dissemination was once bound by the time it took a carrier – an unlucky pigeon... a chugging locomotive... Newman in a USPS truck – to travel from Point A to Point B.
Now, a message can be delivered from Point A... to potentially infinite destinations... concurrently. Time as a denominating factor is thus crushed to dust.
And yet, awash in this thundering Iguazu of information, man discovers that wisdom remains terminally bound by the speed of stupid. More troubling still, the abundance of information has delivered the illusion of intelligence, the most artificial kind of all. Call it “information inflation,” where each newly issued unit is worth less than the last.
Commented one dear reader, FullGrabBag, in response to our last Note...
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?
Instantaneous Idiocy
Mrs. Goose tells us that it is better to remain silent and let others think one a fool, than it is to open one’s mouth and remove all doubt. But now, with answers flowing from his palms like so many multiplying loaves and fishes, man aspires to conceits of truly miraculous proportions.
As to the velocity of his vanity? Let us consider the speed at which AI itself is taking off.
A long, long time ago, waaay back in the year of Our Overlords, 2022, private investment in generative AI stood at roughly $4B, at the low end of the range for a single mid-cap company (typically $2-10B).
Within a year, as ChatGPT rocketed past its first 100M users, that investment pool had grown seven-fold, to just over $28B. By 2025, AI infrastructure spending alone was calculated to be in the vicinity of $320B. This year, according to research from Goldman Sachs, total global investment in AI will hit $1T... or 250x growth in roughly four years. And by 2030, so the tomorrow-tellers forecast, some $5T could be invested in the data centers and infrastructure needed to power the “AI super economy.”
In other words, in the time it takes the duty-bound voter to elect two presidents the other half of the country loathes, an AI-shaped investment ecosystem the size of Germany’s entire economy, the third-largest in the world, just “popped” into existence. And next to nobody saw it coming.
To be sure, this is not an AI story per se… rather, it is the latest chapter in a much longer arc…
Next week, we’ll look at how our vestigial political institutions, stuffed to the gills with the same midwit mahatmas and Washington wonks aforementioned, are almost uniquely unfit to deal with this increasing rate of change... and why the post-political era may soon be upon us.
Stay tuned for more Notes From the End of the World...
Cheers,
Joel Bowman
Tres interested in hearing more about a post-politics concept ….
Now you've really got me pondering about the future.