The 300 Year Civilizational Miracle Part 1

Creating An Industrial Revolution 2.0 For The Digital Age

In 300 years, our civilization has gone from living in dirt to launching rockets into space and living in megacities.

Why?

Exponentially advancing technology.

For tens of thousands of years, we were restricted to traveling by less than 10 mph, and only communicating with those in our physical locality. However, in the space of 300 years, Homo sapiens has invented an array of technologies that equipped man with modern-day magic at his fingertips.

In the space of only 300 years, we’ve invented:

-Steam engines

- Railways

- Electricity

-Smart phones

-Telephones

-Personal computers

- The internet

- Digital money

With the correct framing, one can begin to appreciate that we truly live in a magical era.

The more interesting question to me though, is why and how?

When zooming out and analyzing technological innovations and progress on a multi-thousand-year timeline, many things become apparent.

The majority of the change we see today has come after the 1770s miracle era.

What was so special about this era, that I’m calling the 1770s miracle?

This question sent me down an interesting rabbit hole and it was my love of technology and history that led me to make a seemingly left-field connection….

Could civilizational progress be viewed through the lens of an exponential S-curve?

Before I make the case for why I believe we’ve crossed the ‘’inflection point,’’ on the civilizational curve of exponential flourishing, and hurtling towards a technological and economic singularity, we must first master the basics, and understand what S-curves are.

Understanding exponential change is something all us humans struggle with wrapping our minds around.  

Exponentials are always hard for the human brain to spot, because we’ve biologically evolved over millions of years to only deal with and think about linear, predictable change.

-There are four seasons in a year.

- 24 hours in a day.

- Chasing down animals over constant distances.

It was natural that when we began inventing more and more technology, we would often miss forecast the exponential change it would bring.

‘’The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function’’- Albert Allen Bartlett

Most people struggle to conceptualize how folding a standard piece of paper 50 times theoretically becomes thicker in size than the distance from the earth to the sun.

Figure 2: Size of a piece of paper folded 50 times (source).

The faster we immerse ourselves around technology, the faster these technological adoptions unfold.

Most people can’t conceptualize exponential adoption curves on a multi decade timeline, and this is why most people are late to spotting emergent technologies that get invented and mass adopted in their lifetime.

Spotting exponential trends on a multi-thousand-year timeframe is even more challenging, and inconceivable for our linearly wired brains.

The key to understanding whether we’re living through exponential change is to look for inflection points that indicate whether a chasm has been crossed or not.

Analyzing the adoption cycles of disruptive technologies serves as the best template we have for attempting to understand and spotting the exponential change we’re living through on a multi-thousand-year timeframe.

Once we understand this framework at the micro level, we will be able to zoom out to the macro level and analyze how I believe we’re currently hurtling towards the economic and technological singularity.