Get Used to it: No Solid Ground in the Age of Accelerations

posted by Banning Garrett on January 4, 2017 - 2:25pm

About 40 years ago, I was in my little office on the fifth floor of an academic building on the University of California, Berkeley, campus when the entire building started to move under my feet.  As earthquakes go, it was not an especially notable event.  But it was one of the most unnerving experiences I have ever had.  It was not a startling, violent shake that comes and goes quickly.  Rather, it was as if I was no longer on solid ground - that even the earth was no longer a stable point of reference but rather becoming unhinged from the universe.  It was only for a few tens of seconds, although it seemed like it might go on forever.  Order in the universe was soon restored and I have rarely thought about the incident over the decades since. 

I mention this experience because it has struck me that we may be entering a period in which the key reference points for stability in our human universe - like the role earth and gravity play for us -- may be becoming frighteningly fluid all at the same time in a world of accelerations.  Three accelerations, to be precise, as Tom Friedman hammers on about in his important new book, Thank You for Being Late.[1] 

The first acceleration, according to Friedman, is technology that has entered the “second half of the chessboard” of Moore’s law, “where the doubling has gotten so big and fast we’re starting to see stuff that is fundamentally different in power and capability from anything we have seen before -- self-driving cars, computers that can think on their own and beat any human in chess or Jeopardy! Or even Go, a 2,500-year-old game considered vastly more complicated than chess.” 

Technological development is not only exponential but key technologies are coming together to create new, game changing products and services or product/services.  The iPhone, introduced a decade ago, was the result of a huge range of technologies coming together, from the microchip and the Internet to the GPS system, digital photography, touch screens, and artificial intelligence.  Self-driving cars are similarly based on of exponential technologies coming together and dropping exponentially in price, including AI, cloud computing, sensors, GPS, and many others.  The smartphone has been transformational for society and the economy, including in the developing world.  Autonomous vehicles will be massively transformative for transportation systems, cities, labor markets, and the automotive industry itself.  The embedding of AI in almost all things digital in the coming decade may have an even greater disruptive impact on the world. 

The second acceleration is the “global flows of commerce, finance, credit, social networks, and connectivity generally,” which is “weaving markets, media, central banks, companies, schools, communities, and individuals more tightly together than ever.  The resulting flows of information and knowledge are making the world not only interconnected and hyperconnected but interdependent - everyone everywhere is now more vulnerable to the actions of anyone anywhere.” Global trade in goods may be slowing, but globalization is nevertheless continuing to accelerate, especially in the digital realm, expanding and deepening our interconnectedness, for bad as well as good, as ISIS’ use of social media and Russia’s political cyberwarfare have demonstrated.  By 2016, half of the global population was connected to the Internet.  Google, Facebook, Virgin Atlantic, Boeing, Space X, and others are working on systems to connect the other half.  By the early 2020s, if not sooner, nearly everyone on the planet who wants to be connected to the Internet will be able to connect, even in remote areas and with very limited resources.  Already, there are millions of people in India without indoor toilets who nevertheless are connected through smartphones.  As a friend at Facebook once said, “connectivity is the revolution.”  This connectivity revolution has already produced massive disruption, including politically as well as economically and socially.

The third acceleration is “climate change, population growth, and biodiversity loss - all of which have been accelerating, as they, too, enter the second halves of their chessboards.”  The challenges of climate change and environmental stresses will be compounded over the next thirty years by adding more than two billion people to the global population, to the middle class of consumers, and to urban regions that are already unmanageable.  These long-term global trends are likely to produce unpredictable disruptions and discontinuities, both natural and human.  Experts warn that climate change could not only reach a “tipping point” of no return at 2.0 or even 1.5 degrees of average temperature increase but also that massive ice sheets could slide off land in Greenland and Antarctica, suddenly and massively raising sea levels. 

Friedman contends that the “three accelerations” are interacting with each other to create a “supernova” that is overwhelming our ability to comprehend and adapt.  “Moore’s law is driving more globalization and more globalization is driving more climate change …  and at the same time transforming almost every aspect of modern life.” Weak states especially are being overwhelmed by the three accelerations. This is already apparent in Africa and the Middle East, where the “supernova,” including climate change, has played -- and will continue to play -- a major role contributing to conflict and state failure.  Scientists have concluded that climate change was a critical factor in an unprecedented drought in Syria that contributed to the outbreak of the civil Syrian war that continues to rage.

The “supernova” is not just one looming threat, like the doomsday threat of nuclear war that us Boomers grew up with, underscored by the “duck and cover” drills we endured as kids, which as adults we realized were an utterly ridiculous response.  And unlike the almost universally unexpected and disorienting end of the Cold War, which pulled a key pillar of the international order out from under us, now there is more than one “solid ground” shifting at once, even if the discontinuities are a little less dramatic. We are seeing almost everything around us subject to accelerating change and disruption.  We seek reliable reference points like an astronaut vainly searching for “up” and “down.” 

I agree with Friedman that we are on the “second half of the chessboard” of exponential development of technology, globalization and climate change, and that this change in all three accelerants will itself be accelerating.  The age of exponentials poses an unprecedented challenge for understanding, forecasting, and adaptation.  Can mere linear-minded humans comprehend, much less cope with, exponentially accelerating change? Can we understand all the conflicting forces that have been unleashed by technological change, global connectivity, and the Anthropocene era of humans reshaping the geology and ecology of the planet? Do we even understand the impact that our own activity has had in shaping our world today, much less forecast how it will develop in the future? Can we develop concepts, policies and institutions to anticipate and adapt to change that is happening faster and faster in more and more interactive realms at the same time?  Can we abandon comfortable but inadequate worldviews that have become conventional wisdom over the decades but now often are misleading or simply leave us clueless?  Can individuals, businesses, governments and other organizations, orient to the future without reliable solid ground, or “up” and “down”?  This is likely to be increasingly challenging and require unprecedented foresight, flexibility, and becoming comfortable dealing with constantly moving targets.    

It will be even more difficult in the future to foresee the impact of the three accelerations on nations and geopolitics. Assessment of the present as well as forecasting the future will require understanding and assessing how all three accelerations are acting at the same time and mutually influencing each to shape -- and disrupt -- the international environment and thus the context for specific issues of concern.

Overcoming the natural human tendency to see the world in linear terms, extrapolating the present into the future with only incremental change, will be one of the biggest challenges.  Such linear extrapolations can blind us to foreseeing dramatic, world-historical discontinuities like the collapse of the Soviet Union, the 9/11 terrorist attacks and especially their impact, the 2008 financial crisis, or the 2011 “Arab Spring.”  Moreover, the populist-nationalist uprisings in the United Kingdom and the United States also caught many analysts by surprise and are leading to major discontinuities in the foreign and domestic policies of both countries.

It is a major challenge to develop and “build in” approaches to understanding and anticipating accelerating change that is likely to include continual “disruptions,” “step function changes,” and “discontinuities.” It is much easier and safer to stay in the linear realm than to forecast disruption, especially since disruptions or discontinuities are “unpredictable” even though they are foreseeable.  They are, as Peter Schwartz noted years ago, “inevitable surprises.” 

It will be increasingly important to overcome conceptual “stove piping” which creates significance obstacles integration of analysis of technology trends, global flows, international politics, and environmental stresses.  The world to be analyzed is not neatly broken down into little discreet boxes but rather is a messy result of the three accelerations that are mutually affecting each other and thus affecting the “target” of analysis, especially as the “space” is broadened and the “time” frame is lengthened.  We know in retrospect, for example, that climate change, the rising price of food, lack of employment opportunity for students, and social media all played a role in the Tahir Square uprising. That was six years ago and all the “accelerations” have been accelerating since then, so the problem of interdisciplinary knowledge acquisition and integration has only become more demanding and difficult. 

The biggest challenge will be not just to understand the accelerations and better forecast the future, but to adapt to a world with fewer dependable points of reference and less “solid ground.”  A world where constant change and frequent disruptions and discontinuities are the rule rather than the exception.  A world in which much of the real stuff we need to understand and deal with is a result of chaotic, messy, unpredictable bottom up processes (both human actions and natural phenomena) rather than top down decisions and actions by leaders of government, big business and big organizations .  The latter will still be important but they will perhaps be a decreasingly salient part of the story as the leaders themselves are buffeted and battered by the “three accelerations.”  Get used to the earth moving under your feet… or as Tom Friedman would say, “learn to dance in a hurricane.”

1. Thomas L. Friedman, Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist’s Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016).