Welcome to this week’s Sunday Story, another instalment in the Disruption series. Previously we’ve talked about how disruption is here, now because of AI. We’ve talked about Black Swans and how it’s always the thing you don’t expect - the outlier - that has the potential to cause the biggest change that a leader must contend with. Today, we’re focusing on the accelerating pace of change, and you’re going to read about a masterful prediction from over a decade ago that linked together the exponential filling Lake Michigan and the shrinking of computers to pocket sized - a trend that is continuing today!
The pace of life is something I’ve thought a lot about. You’ve often heard it - a year seems long when you’re young, but goes by fast when you’re old. Time is a relative experience, it would seem; one theory being that as you age, the percentage of your life that one year represents is ever smaller, making them seem relatively faster.
But if you zoom out a bit on the individual and look at the pace of life historically, you’ll see things differently. Anatomically modern humans have been around for about 200,000 years.
Some time in the last 20,000 years, we figured out how to build really large buildings with rocks (Specifically, Monte Verde in Chile; Gobleki Tepi in Turkey is a 12,000 year old example). Big buildings made of stacked rocks require an innovation that changed the world though, regardless of when it happened - agriculture. Big buildings require lots of workers, and it’s hard to support large populations by hunting and gathering alone; it doesn’t take long for large populations to hunt an area out. Agriculture is necessary for big buildings to be a thing.
So that means that for between 180,000 years and 194,000 years (since when humans “discovered” agriculture is debated) humans experienced…the same sorts of things, day in and day out.
Agriculture comes along, and it allows the creation of cities. Bronze was replaced with Iron, but not much changed for a while again. Major historical shifts include the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, events separated by centuries - but the manner of life for typical individuals in the early Roman Empire wasn’t that different from folks in the late Roman Empire. Certainly, there were differences — currency, culture, etc. - but fundamentally not much changed.
The Renaissance and Enlightenment ultimately paved the way for the Industrial Revolution, and that’s when we started seeing the pace of change pick up a bit. The 1800s saw the advent of railroads and ships that could make progress without relying on wind. These were massive changes that people had to contend with - indeed, some “experts” in the early days of Railroads expressed concern about anyone but able bodied men riding on trains; Trains were allowing people to travel faster than literally anyone in human history, and these ‘experts’ were concerned about how these irresponsibly high velocities (about 35 miles an hour) - remember, up until this point, the fastest any human being had travelled over land was likely via horse, which caps out at about 30 miles an hour. We travelled that way for thousands of years until the railroad came along.
Enter the 1900s. In 1901, the United States Navy declared that the idea of human beings flying was a “vain fantasy” for children. In 1903, the New York Times boldly predicted that that figuring out powered human flight would take “between one and ten million years”.
9 weeks after that article was published, the Wright Brothers did their thing at Kitty Hawk. Only 66 years later, we were walking on the moon. Only 10 years after that, we launched Voyager, which has since left our solar system and entered the cosmos. That’s a bit faster than “between one and ten million years”, isn’t it?
Both of these monumental achievements were accomplished with slide rules and abacuses, and most of the people reading this article will remember their high school teacher claiming that “You must learn these things because you won’t have a calculator in your pocket everywhere you go when you grow up”. They were technically right - we don’t have a calculator in our pocket. We have a digital device that can access the sum total of human knowledge whenever we want to, and allow us to communicate in real-time with HD video literally all around the world, in addition to being able to do math!
The overall point with the above meander through history is that it took us tens of thousands of years - and countless human lifetimes - to go from hunter-gatherers to farmers. It took thousands more years to go from farmers to industrial producers of things using energy. It took us decades to crack flight, and then just individual years to crack the atom and space travel. The pace of change is accelerating for humanity, like a hockey stick - almost imperceptibly flat for millennia, then spiking dramatically over the last few years, and this pace of change means disruption is inevitable.
Let’s make it really tangible and talk about Moore’s Law. In essence, Moore’s Law states that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit will double every 18 months to 2 years or so. This law was posited in the 1960s by a man who would later become the CEO of Intel, and while he limited his prediction to the following decade after he made it, observation has proven this to be true since it was proposed and thus it has become known as a “law”. If you remember our introduction to the Disruption series, we talked about how humans struggle to conceptualize big numbers, but we’ve found a wonderful analogy by Kevin Drum who wrote an article for Mother Jones on this very topic.
He started his analogy in 1940 - the year of the first integrated circuit - and asks the reader to imagine that you are trying to fill a totally drained Lake Michigan. You are allowed to add one fluid ounce of water to start in 1940. 18 months later (Mid-1941) you are allowed to to double it - add two ounces. 18 months after that (so now it’s January 1944), you can add 4 ounces. 18 months later, 8 ounces, and so on - the amount of water you can add doubles every 18 months.
In 1950 - a full decade after you started - you’ve got about a gallon of water in Lake Michigan. After 30 years, you might feel you are really making progress - by the 1970s, you’ve got about 16,000 gallons of water in the lake! Nice work!
But it turns out math is a funny thing - Lake Michigan can hold about one quadrillion gallons of water. You need to drain 400 billion gallons of water just to make the level change by one inch. After 30 years of effort, you’ve made less of a difference to the amount of water in the lake than a rounding error.
This pace of change continues for a few more decades. In 2010, according to Drum, you might have an inch or two of water, here or there - “not enough to float a goldfish” as per Kevin Drum, and that’s after 70 years of effort.
But hang on - 10 more years pass, so it’s now 2020. You’ve gone from an inch here or there to the entire lake being 40 feet deep.
By 2025 the entire lake is full.
That’s the power of exponential growth. 70 years of effort for nearly zero result, and then the entire job seems to be finished in the span of just 10-15 years. And the thing is: This isn’t just a random thought experiment. This analogy represents exactly how much faster computers are today than they were just five years ago.
It’s especially prescient when you consider that Mr. Drum wrote this article in 2013, and his predictions have proven to be correct. IBM has very recently released a modular quantum computer - knowing what that means is less relevant than understanding that quantum computers are orders of magnitude faster than the computers we currently commonly use. Quantum Computers are to the circuits in your iPhone as the circuits in you iPhone are to vacuum tubes (which is how computers worked before integrated circuits, back when they'd take up an entire room).
You know this shift is happening fast - you can feel it. Do you remember a single person talking about artificial intelligence in 2021? Probably not; outside of science fiction or very niche areas of machine learning and computer science it was an incredibly uncommon topic. But now, it’s front of mind for people all over the world as we try to anticipate what this means for us.
The pace of change is faster than it ever has, and it shows no signs of slowing down. Change is happening so fast, you don’t have time to wrap your head around this stuff - but all of us have to. I’m hopeful that this blog series can help.
See you next Sunday.
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