my research indicates the world is going through a complete transformation. i could be wrong.
but if i am not wrong, then there is something significant happening right now. if so, why aren’t more people “waking up” to see what is occurring right before them?
edit:
i will definitely not be doxxing myself by sharing any of my research projects, custom tools or other resources that could identify me.
what i will say is there are enough of you here who understand what i am saying to speak plainly…
from my position in space and time, we coexist in an era of great opportunity. right before we begin mining and colonizing space, truly epic times. only a few will notice which way the winds are blowing. if you have the guts and savvy to figure it out by doing your homework, i say take full advantage of your observations. whatever your ambitions are. it’s okay to be a little selfish and make real change happen.
Up until 2016, Moore’s law had been true for a little over 50 years. It’s not an exact correlation, but the exponential growth in computing power has definitely been a significant part in today’s world.
I think “exponential change” is a bit too vague, but in many areas, like medicine for example, those areas far exceed exponential growth. Even seemingly “primitive” fields like farming is far changed from 50+ years ago thanks to the growth of computing.
The problems with describing this like one parabola are two-fold for me. If we look at the long arm of history, we as a species have been far less interconnected so knowledge wasn’t shared to the same extent it often is today. One of the reasons why a hypothetical Covid-819 would’ve killed more people. At the same time, various regions have gone through their own periods of trouble, dark ages, decays of empires, and religious doom. You’d have to interpolate quite heavily in the bottom part of the parabola to get started. Bronze tools could take a century to spread. Strictly speaking, Gutenberg didn’t invent book printing; China beat him to it. But the repercussions of his movable type were arguably far more reaching. Or more recently, the industrial revolution started around 1750 but didn’t affect a majority on this planet until about 50 years later. There were uncontacted people it never reached that were washed away by the 2006 tsunami. Where to plot these things on an overarching exponential graph become choices. And thus a statistic you’re forging yourself.
And then exponential means at some point we’re going to reach a point where we near constantly innovate stuff. You’d have to do the work of two scientific Nobel prizes before you had your first piss in the morning just to keep up with the pace. This pace of development isn’t sustainable. There has to be an out.
That’s why I would favour a model based on quantum leaps that show localised growth in hockey stick curves. Change today may seem fundamental and omnipresent. But 🫲 six seven 🫱 probably never reached North Korea.
I suppose it depends on the scope of your question. I’m far from being a history expert so my opinion is not a strong one based on concrete data. That said, if we think of humanity as a whole over the past 2000+ years, and plot on graph that change, i would bet that curve looks exponential. Zoomed into shorter periods or populations, there will absolutely be more variance showing that quantum leaps. Something like bronze tools while taking a century to spread, greatly increased efficiencies in developing new technologies, like iron and steel. The ability to communicate almost instantly around the world has taken that all to an extreme level.
I don’t think that exponential growth is something that can continue, and given my Moore’s law example, that ended a decade ago. But with technology like LLMs that can theoretically push things to the next level, ignoring all of the ethical implications and current shortcomings, that traps change could still go crazy for a long time.
Like I said, I’m no expert, and I could be way off base. It would be interesting to see “change” somehow quantified over the span of humanity and see what looks like graphed out. It’s definitely not linear growth, and it may not be purely exponential, but it for sure trends that way across all of humanity.
Your point on communication largely being the key to the rapid spread of technology I think is the most important part. It’s allowed technology to be spread fast enough that as long as you have the resources and a capable enough government that isn’t corrupt, and are relatively stable, your state can catch up technologically rather fast. This is proven by China and it’s rapid advances over the last 50 or so years. Not that they didn’t have help, especially early on from the soviets. But they’ve bought western products, and reverse engineered them and made their own versions. Between that and advancing education policies, allowed them not only to catch up, but in a lot of areas, surpass the west.
If African nations could fix their corruption issues (specifically exploited and kept in place by outside powers) and use their resources to grow their economies they could catch up quickly as well. Unfortunately there’s so much of a power unbalance, there’s not a lot of ability to nationalize diamond mines for instance.
Ukraine is another great example of how quickly a country can advance if there is enough of a will. Existential crises have a tendency to create a will. But if there was no Internet, and no fast travel, they wouldn’t have had much of a chance to defend itself.