When we take a step back and try to observe the macro aspects society, we can see just how much things have changed. 40 years ago the internet was not a thing. Can you imagine!? I sound silly, as I often do when talking about things like this, but can you eve think about “life before?” Life before we carried these little supercomputers in our pockets…life before “fake news!”…and “Facetime.”
Life before…I think about all the time. I think about how far we have come as a species and how fast things are changing (in my opinion, largely for the better).
As we look towards the future, it is so incredibly hard to think about what will come next. I think we can guess, and we can spend some time making educated guesses, but even accurately imagining the future of society is really really challenging.
I like this excerpt from Sam Altman on this topic:
I don’t think people knew what was gonna happen because it’s sort of … It’s unimaginable what has happened. Fourteen years ago, Facebook was a website that no one took seriously in Mark Zuckerberg’s dorm room. You know, 14 years ago, the first prototype of the iPhone, I don’t think, had been made. The speed and the size and the impact that has happened, I think that we’ve just lived through one of the three great technological revolutions in human history, and the rate of change of technology is so much faster than the rate of change of people; certainly of evolution, but even how quickly we can update our own thought processes.
Sam Altman
I am often reminded that things change slowly, until they don’t.
Also published on Medium.