It’s about 55 years since Alvin Toffler published the popular book, Future Shock. In it he said the current lifetime witnessed more change than in the previous 800 lifetimes combined! He said we would eventually experience a Future Shock, similar to culture shock, in which people lose a sense of familiarity and feel routinely disoriented.Is that happening now?
Each individual knows a diminishing portion of all available knowledge. It’s getting progressively more difficult to find common knowledge, beliefs, attitudes, and interests with other people. People recoil from community and suffer from information overload, denial, and cognitive fatigue, further diminishing their ability to cope.
People are looking for clear, simple, certain and unambiguous order. They want to comprehend and control their lives. They instinctively form tight herds in self-defense (safety in numbers), line up behind one leader or the other, and call the other leader evil or stupid. A line is drawn in the sand. “You’re either with us or you’re against us.”
They shout their threats, shake their spears, rattle and raise their swords in preparation for armed confrontation. Tensions escalate until some trigger is pulled and starting gates burst open in an anticipated surprise attack.
This scenario has played out countless times in past civilizations in which civil complexity and the pace of change accelerated out of control. The Law of Requisite Variety states that any viable system must be able to sufficiently match the variety of opportunities and threats in its environment. We have created a global civil environment that is too complex to manage. We’re not smart enough!
The human brain was designed by evolutionary intelligence to fit into and manage a simpler world of small communities living in harmony with a local ecosystem. As the population grew to eight billion (8,000,000,000) and technology grew at a compounded exponential rate, we broke a universal Scaling Law. Leaders were never intended to lose eye contact or empathy with their followers.
But as boiled frogs in an overshoot situation we teeter on a tipping point, on the verge of civil collapse, poised like so many other now deceased civilizations just before their demise… Maybe not this year or next, but soon and inevitably, unless we smarten up and obey the laws of Nature.
But will some combination of personal, methodical, and collective intelligence, augmented with artificial intelligence, save the day, and postpone the inevitable?I believe there is a vague roadmap to a prolonged sustainable future that is based on an understanding of the essential nature of intelligence. We are a system of systems embedded in a system of systems.
Randal Adcock 