Out of Our Minds. Robinson Ken

of William Shakespeare. Snitterfield is where William Shakespeare’s father, John, was born in 1531. When he was 20 years old, John left Snitterfield to seek his fortune in Stratford. It is almost impossible to grasp the differences between his view of the world and ours almost 500 years later, when business travelers fly across continents to attend meetings for the weekend and then forget where they’ve been. For most of human history, social change was snail-like in comparison with now. As we’ll see later, there were revolutionary discoveries, expeditions and technological inventions during his lifetime. Even so, John Shakespeare’s daily life probably differed very little from that of his parents, grandparents or great grandparents.

      “To understand how hard it is to anticipate the future now, we need only think of how difficult it proved to predict the future in the past.”

      My father never left England. For work or pleasure, I’ve now been to most countries in Europe, to the Far East and to many parts of the United States and Australia. By their early teens, my children had visited more countries than I had by the age of 40. When I was growing up in the 1950s and 60s, I thought of my parents’ childhood in the 1920s as the Middle Ages: horses in the street, few cars, steam trains, grand ocean liners, no air travel to speak of, no television and few telephones. When we got our first black and white television in 1959, we felt we’d reached the last stage of human evolution. My own children have a similarly quaint view of my childhood: only two television channels, no color or surround sound, no video games, smartphones, tablets or social media. Their world is inconceivably different from those of my grandparents and great grandparents.

      The differences are not only in the nature of change but also in the pace of it. The most profound changes haven’t happened in 500 years, most of them have happened in the past 200 years and especially in the last 50, and they are getting faster. According to one estimate:

      • in 1950 the average person traveled about 5 miles per day

      • in 2000 the average person traveled about 30 miles per day

      • in 2020 the average person will travel about 60 miles per day.

      Imagine the past 3000 years as the face of a clock with each of the 60 minutes representing a period of 50 years. Until three minutes ago, the history of transport was dominated by the horse, the wheel and the sail. In the late eighteenth century, James Watt refined the steam engine. This changed everything. It was a major tremor in the social earthquake of the Industrial Revolution. The improved steam engine vastly increased the power available for industrial production. It paved the way for faster methods of transport by road and sea and made possible the development of railways, the arterial system of the early industrial world. The steam engine impelled vast movements of humanity at speeds that were never thought possible. Since then, the curve of change has climbed almost vertically:

      The revolution in transport is one index of the pace of change, but it’s not the fastest one.

      GETTING THE MESSAGE

      Human beings have had access to writing systems for at least 3000 years. For most of that time these systems hardly changed. People communicated by making marks on surfaces, using pens on paper, chisels on stone or pigment on boards. Written documents existed in single copies and had to be copied by hand. Only a privileged few had access to them and only those few needed to be able to read. Between 1440 and 1450, about 11 minutes ago on our clock, Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press. Since then the rate of change has gone into overdrive. Think of the major innovations in communication in the past 200 years, and how the gaps on the clock have shortened:

      When I was born in 1950, no one had a home computer. The average computer then was about the size of your living room. This was one reason people didn’t buy them: they weren’t inclined to live outdoors to accommodate a largely useless device. A second reason was the cost. Computers cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Only government departments and some companies had computers. In 1950 the transistor was invented. In 1970, the silicon chip was developed. These innovations not only reduced the size of computers, they vastly increased their speed and power. The standard memory capacity has increased exponentially since then, from a few hundred kilobytes to several gigabytes.

      The smartphones in your pocket has more computing power than was available on earth in 1940. In 1960, Jerome Bruner and George Miller founded the Harvard Center for Cognitive Studies: the first institute dedicated to cognitive science. The Institute was well funded and purchased the first computer used in America for psychological experimentation: a PDP4 minicomputer. It cost $65,000 in 1962 and came with 2K of memory, upgradable to 64K.8 Nowadays many children’s toys have more computing power than that. The average digital wristwatch has appreciably more power than the 1969 Apollo Moonlander: the space vehicle from which Neil Armstrong took his small step for man and his giant leap for mankind.

      It is estimated that something in the order of 10¹⁷ microchips are being manufactured every year; a number, I’m told, that’s roughly equivalent to the world population of ants. I repeat it here in the confident knowledge that it can’t be checked. This prodigious rate of production indicates the vast range of applications for which computers are now used. The pace of expansion in computer technology over the past 70 years has been breathtaking. Here’s a rough chronology:

      The Internet is the most powerful and pervasive communication system ever devised. It grows daily, like a vast, multiplying organism; millions of connections are added at an ever-faster rate in patterns that resemble ganglia in the brain. Just like the brain, the most robust synapses are the ones that fire most often. Inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil points out that the evolution of biological life and of technology have followed the same pattern. They both take a long time to get going but advances build on one another and progress erupts at an increasingly ferocious pace: “During the 19th century, the pace of technological progress was equal to that of the ten centuries that came before it. Advancement in the first two decades of the 20th century matched that of the entire 19th century. Today significant technological transformations take just a few years … Computing technology is experiencing the same exponential growth.” 9

      In the mid-1960s, Gordon Moore co-founded Intel. He estimated that the density of transistors on integrated circuit boards was doubling every 12 months and that computers were periodically doubling both in capacity and in speed per unit cost. In the mid-1970s, Moore revised his estimate to about 24 months. Moore’s Law may have run its course around 2020. By then transistors may be a few atoms in width. The power of computers will continue to grow, but in different forms. By the way, if the technology of motor cars had developed at the same rate, the average family car could now travel at six times the speed of sound, be capable of about 1,000 miles per gallon and would cost you about one dollar to buy. I imagine you’d get one. You’d just have to be careful with the accelerator.

      1

      Life

8

For a brief account of the origins of the Center see Lehrer, J. (2007).

9

Kurzweil, R. (1999). Reproduced with permission.