My thoughts on what the future holds for humanity are not dissimilar to my experiences of day-trading crypto. That is, an unending oscillation between unbounded optimism and soul-crushing pessimism. But recently I listened to a podcast with Tim Urban which made me just plain excited to see what crazy shit is in store for us. If you haven't heard of him before, check out his blog here. It's filled with some absolute gold (in particular I recommend The Tail End).
"I always thought the future would be intense, but now I think the future is going fully fucking crazy" - Tim Urban
Tim provides a timeline of humanity's progress over the last 140 000 years to put into context the unprecedented rate at which everything is changing, and what that means for the future. I'll try to do his brilliant analogy justice, but if you'd rather just listen to the genius himself, skip to 41:18.
An Alien's Guide to Earthlings
Human history is approximately 140 000 years. In book form, every 200 years would make up only a single page of a 700 page book.
To get a sense of humanity's progression, imagine an alien perusing this 700 page tome.
Pages 1-650: For 650 pages, humans are hunter-gatherers, if you're an alien reading this book, you are boooored. The only reason to continue reading is that your friends swear it gets better.
Page 650: The year is 10 000BC, the agricultural revolution begins and humans start forming cities.
Gets boring again for a while
Page 690: Jesus shows up.
Page 693: Advent of Islam.
Page 697: Imperialism starts spreading and countries are formed.
Page 698: Includes the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, and humanity discovering the existence of galaxies.
Page 699: Marks the beginning of the USA and constitutional democracies. Communication occurs through letters and talking. <1 billion people.
Page 700: The last 200 years until the present. The Industrial Revolution happens, we go to the moon and make a space station, invent airplanes, cars and the internet. We now communicate by phones and Facetime. Cross the 7 billion population mark.
The alien is reading this book, and his wife comes in and says, "We're gonna have dinner soon", and he's like "Shh, shut-up!". This page alone is more riveting than the rest of the book combined.
We're born at the end of page 700, this is why page 701 is going to be insane. The first 3 sentences of 701 take us to 2025, when its predicted AI will infiltrate every part of our life. Tim sees revolutions in Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, Artificial Intelligence, brain-machine interfaces, genetics, and interplanetary exploration all happening on page 701.
I know there are still ample reasons to worry about the future, but surely you'd agree that at the very least, it's going to be damn entertaining.
What an excellent way to put it! I love the book analogy. We are just getting to the good part, aren't we? 😀
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