In our previous entries in the Disruption series, we’ve made the case for how humans have a tough time with big numbers, how it’s usually the Black Swan events that cause the most disruption, the pace of change, and we’ve talked about how modern complexity lends itself to the inevitability of disruption. We’ve also made the case in our white paper and in our Disruption supplemental that we think Artificial Intelligence is going to be one of the big Black Swan disruptors of the decade, but if we could actually tell the future…we’d be buying lotto tickets, not writing blogs.
Disruption is the impact of unanticipated change; transformation is what happened when you anticipate the change and adjust accordingly, and because our society has gotten a lot more complex, we are a lot more vulnerable to technological disruptions in particular.
This Sunday Story is all about 3 case studies from history that - if they happened today - would create a significant disruption to our way of life. And by their very nature, we cannot predict these - which further underscores our point in this series: Change is inevitable, and the acceptance of that inevitability drives leaders to create change-ready teams by leading from clear core values and creating psychologically safe environments. Now that we’ve identified the importance of psychological safety, let’s freak you out with some true stories of historical disasters:
The Carrington Event
It was September of 1859, and two British Richards - astronomers R. Carrington and R. Hodgson - both independently noticed some solar activity during their observations. The Solar Flare they saw was the first time that solar activity was related to geomagnetic activity on earth, and we see this all the time - the Northern Lights are an example of solar radiation hitting earth’s atmosphere, making an incredible dance of light and colour.
But this time, the solar activity was more than usual. Those aforementioned Northern Lights - a staple in Canada- suddenly weren’t very Northern, given they were reported in sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean. Being able to read a newspaper by the light or Aurora was a neat experience for folks alive at the time, but it wasn’t the only observed impact caused by the solar weather.
In 1859, things were a lot different. Ground was just being broken for the Suez Canal, India was getting its first ever railway, and Oregon was just admitted into the union as the 33rd State. The start of the American Civil War was still a few years away, and Canada wouldn’t become a country for nearly another decade. The height of technology at this time was the horse and buggy, the steam railway, and a brand new communications technology that was taking the world by storm: The telegraph.
Samuel Morse had invented the practical Morse Code in the 1830s which popularized the telegraph all over the world by the 1850s as a much faster method of communication. Telegraph wires Criss-crossed modern nations, and the first transatlantic cables were just a few years away. But when the solar storm hit, something odd happened to the telegraph wires: They lit on fire, operators experienced electric shocks when trying to use the transmitters, and machines worked even when disconnected from main power. The solar storm had hit the earth with so much energy, the Telegraph system was overwhelmed completely.
Thankfully, 1859 meant that this was still a relatively new technology, and so essential systems were in the early days of adoption and thus weren’t disrupted too heavily by this event. But what would happen if such an event were to occur today?
Our entire society depends on our electronics working as expected. In 1859, we only had telegraph wires. Now, we’ve got telephone, cable, internet, cell phones, copper wires for household electrical, electric motors, transformers, power plants and substations and more. Anything conductive is affected by a Carrington-like event - and our technology is not shielded against it, including your car, thermostat, and water treatment plant — all of which rely on computers to operate. A solar storm of adequate size could render all of this technology inoperable, and the impact on society is huge. As a case study, imagine the transformers that you see on every single power pole in your city or town - those big grey boxes. In a large solar event, every single one of them could be overwhelmed by the current induced in the transmission wires, and that means every single one of them would need to be replaced. And that condition would exist for every city that was impacted by the solar storm - so whatever portion of the world was facing the sun at that time, which could be thousands of towns and cities.
Now, imagine being one of the owners of a Transformer factory. You’ve got more orders than you ever expected - you’ve seen surges before when a municipality puts power into a new subdivision, but this is orders of magnitude bigger than that. How are you going to build them without trucks - whose internal computers are also shorted out - and without electricity to your factory? How many years until the lights come back on, once they go out?
How likely is it:
It’s a certainty, given enough time - but we don’t know when. What we do know is that we’ve got lots of historical stories of celestial events - times where the ‘northern’ lights didn’t stay north and were visible elsewhere in the world, for instance - and we know for sure it happened in 1859. We also know for sure that the sun goes through regular weather patterns, reaching a “max activity” period every 11 years, meaning it’s spitting solar flares and CMEs out at random, and at levels sometimes equal to or greater than the event that caused the Carrington incident, about every decade or so. It’s only a matter of time before one of these incidents is aimed at Earth - but statistically that could take a few hundred years. Not for nothing - we are currently in solar cycle 25, which started in 2019 and is expected to peak between 2023 and 2026. So…like right now? If this blog doesn’t get many readers, this will be my excuse and I’m sticking to it.
It’s also possible to create the conditions similar to the Carrington event by detonating nuclear warheads in space. This causes an “Electro Magnetic Pulse” which can, theoretically, also render our unshielded technology inoperable. This is impossible to predict as it would depend on many complex factors including trying to understand the motives of specific nuclear-armed nations on earth, but the reason for bringing it up is this: There are two pathways for every single computer on earth to stop working - one natural, one manmade - and the complexity of the modern system means that such an interruption would cause major problems world-wide. Everything you rely on in day-to-day life relies on a computer to get to you - and without computers, we’re in trouble.
Volcanoes
These are a fact of life for humans on earth, and yet we often underestimate their global impact. A lot of the doomsday types will focus on the mega volcanos - like Yellowstone - where if they erupt, it means all life on earth is done. This is possible but it’s highly unlikely to be anytime soon, and even if it was, there’s not much we can do to come back from that, so there’s not much point in worrying about this anymore than you should worry about a Gamma ray burst crossing the path of Earth’s orbit.
Far more disruptive to modern society would be a lesser volcanic eruption, and those happen all the time. In 1815, the Tambora volcano in Indonesia was one of the most powerful eruptions ever recorded. It made 1816 be known as “The year without summer” and caused massive climate shifts around the world, resulting in crop failure and significant starvation. In 1883, another volcano let go - Krakatoa - and similarly caused global cooling of 0.4 degrees (Remember the Paris Climate Accord is a commitment to hold the earth below 2 degrees of warming - 0.4 degrees from one event is significant!). In 1783 an eruption in Iceland, called the Laki eruption, caused thousands of deaths in Mainland Europe as toxic clouds of gas covered the continent.
These “smaller” eruptions occur with regularity, and they have global effects - above are just three examples all within 100 years of each other, and this was at a time before air travel and when most people ate food from within a few miles of where they live.
We’ve seen the impact of even a modest volcanic eruption in a modern system - in April of 2010, another Icelandic volcano erupted and the ash cloud caused flight cancellations in Europe for weeks following. Over 10 million travellers were impacted by this event, and relative to Laki this was a very small eruption (0.1 cubic kilometers of volcanic ejecta in 2010 as compared to 13 cubic kilometers in Laki). The reason we are highlighting this example is that it’s been a while since we’ve seen a truly significant eruption, but the impact on the modern system - as demonstrated by the 2010 eruption - is likely to be far greater in 2024 than it was in 1783.
How likely is it?
A major society disruption due to a natural disaster like a volcano is inevitable, but what matters is the context of when it happens. Remember what we wrote in our previous blog - that it’s not the faulty fuel pump that gets you, it’s the faulty fuel pump AND the ambient temperature AND the half-full tanks. The 2010 volcano was barely a fraction of the size of the Laki volcano, and yet its impact was huge on Europe because of the increased complexity of our systems. But, we recovered pretty quickly from that 2010 incident and I bet until I mentioned in this blog, it’s been a moment or three since you’ve even thought of it.
That’s where the context of the time comes in. A volcanic eruption in 2010 was no big deal, but a Tambora-sized volcanic eruption that causes a year of crop failures, in conjunction with food scarcity caused by Europe’s Ukrainian breadbasket being compromised by war could be way worse.
Other Technological Surprise
Things are changing fast in our tech world, and as we’ve written about before, the speed of change is a uniquely modern phenomenon that will impact our complex society in ways that prior technology shifts have not. AI is the premier technological disruptor that we see on the horizon, but there are a couple more that you should be aware of. We’ve already spoken enough about AI, so let’s talk about other technologies that are coming down the pipeline to be aware of:
First, there is a lot of talk around LK-99, an alleged room temperature superconductor that has been making headlines since late last year. It was a big deal, then some folks struggled to replicate the results, but then a Chinese team allegedly succeeded in recreating the original experiment with a minor adjustment. This matters because superconductivity is the key to both enhanced processing power (really smart computers) and really efficient energy (fusion). Fusion is a form of nuclear power, but unlike our current nuclear power (which is splitting atoms apart) fusion is about bringing atoms together. This produces less nuclear waste and in the event of an accident, a fission reaction does what we saw at Chernobyl, 3 Mile Island, and Fukushima. A Fusion reaction, on the other hand, just…stops. One of the barriers to this technology being commercially viable is the availability of room-temperature super conductors, so LK-99 is a big deal and a potential breakthrough that allows for a type of energy production that renders all current methods - wind, solar, fossil fuels - obsolete. And it’s not the only possible shift in sources of energy on the horizon, but the other one is for a post of it’s own.
Second, we have quantum computing. IBM has recently released their first ever modular quantum computer. This gets confusing fast, but in terms of power, quantum computers are to your iPhone what your iPhone is to the room-sized vacuum tube computers of the 1950s.
Third, we have robotics. We’ve touched on this before, but Figure 1, Boston Dynamics, and more firms are working on creating robots that can do everything from evacuate people from disaster zones to serve as personal maids and assistants.
These three are all related - of the big barriers behind better robotics is processing power to drive the robot’s “brain”. And one of the big barriers behind making better robot brains is cheap electricity to drive the computer processors. Finally, one of the big barrier behind cheap electricity is the manner in which we create it. But, a breakthrough in any one area can result in a breakthrough in the other areas - already, Google’s Gemini has transformed how scientific analysis of materials is being done, and that’s just the beginning.
How likely is this to happen?
Inevitable, if we survive as a species. All of these technologies above, including AI, are today at the closest we’ve been as a species to this idea of a “Singularity” - a point where the tools humanity has created have the ability to create new, better tools that humans could not create. In other words, our machines will end up being smarter than us, and being able to solve problems and invent things that we cannot. What follows is an incredibly rapid advancement of technology which has a massively disruptive impact on society. Some would argue this is the phase we have been in for some time - the pace of change following the industrial revolution has been reaching asymptotic speeds, but it has yet to surpass human ingenuity. But we think it’s about to, and a lot of people think we’re close - as close as a few years. Other experts feel more pessimistic and suggest this is decades away - but with literally hundreds of billions of dollars from Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, X, and more fuelling a multi-company race to AI supremacy, it would be unwise to assume this is a distant future.
The above three examples - a modern-day Carrington event, volcanic eruptions shifting the earth’s climate suddenly, or a major technological breakthrough - could have profound impacts on how our society works and functions. And all of them are way beyond our control. The goal isn’t to control these disruptors, it’s to accept that disruption is inevitable.
With that in mind, what do you as a leader need to do to be successful? Do you need to drive KPIs and shareholder returns? Yes, probably - but that’s not all. You need to be connected to your community. You need to have people in your life who will drop off a card and a casserole if you or your loved ones are going through a tough time. You need to foster skills that support the success of others. You need to create a sense of belonging - which can only come with psychological safety - and you need to clearly let those you share community with know your values and know what you are about.
When disruption is inevitable - and it is - those who have created the conditions to adapt to change and take advantage of the opportunities will thrive. Those who decide to role-play an Ostrich and presume things are going to stay the same are in for a tough time. And on that note - a successful leader today will hold space in their community for the ostriches too - their heads will come out of the sand eventually.
And with that, thanks for reading. We’ll see you next Sunday.
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