Sunday April 23, 2006
Exponential change threatens our survival
As the price of crude oil soared past $70 a barrel, gasoline at less than a dollar a litre already seems like a distant memory. It feels unbelievable that when I first started driving, I bought gasoline for 25 cents a gallon – about six cents a litre!
And yet, in historic terms, that wasn\’t so long ago. Just 50 years. The civil rights movement had not yet begun in the United States. Space travel was still a faraway gleam in Werner Von Braun\’s imagination. Smallpox, TB and polio were still rampant globally.
So much has changed…
Except us…
We human beings have failed to recognize the impact of exponential change. “Exponential” – that means self-multiplying. Change doesn\’t progress linearly from 1 to 2 to 3 to 4, but from 1 to 2 to 4 to 8 to 16…
Exponential change means we have less and less time to deal with change, to adapt to it, or to counteract it.
For me, the best illustration is a fable, a parable.
A fishpond had a few lilies far away at one end. The lilies doubled their coverage of the pond\’s surface every season. A few fish raised alarms, but the king of the goldfish wasn\’t worried. “There\’s still plenty of pond left,” he ruled.
Until the day that the lilies covered half the pond. “Gentlefish,” the king decreed, “those lilies threaten our survival. It\’s time we did something about them.”
But by then, the fish had only one season in which to make up for generations of neglect and complacency.
Doubling times
A graph of exponential change typically starts with very small numbers. The line rises very slowly. Until one day it turns a corner, and soars upward almost vertically.
Computer power, for example, doubles every two years or so. Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, once believed that 640 kilobytes of memory “should be enough for anybody.”
But at a predictable future date, argues mathematician Frank J. Tipler, computers will have as much working memory as a human being\’s total neurons. (Even if his calculations are out by as much as 50 per cent, he adds, he will only miss by two years.)
That\’s an extreme example. Other technologies change on slightly longer cycles. But they reflect the same exponential curve.
My local cable company tells me that their capabilities double every five years. So the original 13 TV channels became 50, became 500. Currently, it takes almost as long to download a movie as to watch it. With the next generation of cable connections, it will take less than two minutes.
Futurist Frank Ogden, who bills himself as Dr. Tomorrow, jokes that “Things are moving so rapidly that I\’m wondering if there\’s a future for futurists. People can no longer see more than five years down the road, let alone a generation.”
Within 25 years, he continues, even a five-year prediction may be impossible: “Change will be so rapid, you won\’t recognize the world the next day!”
Incapable of responding
Tragically, though, our human social structures seem incapable of responding to change as fast as change comes upon us.
The last 50 years have demonstrated steadily rising temperatures, increasingly severe storms, longer droughts.
Yet politicians continue to debate whether economies can afford to action on climate change. According to cabinet documents obtained by the Globe and Mail, the Canadian government plans to slash spending on Environment Canada programs against global warming by 80 per cent, and wants cuts of 40 per cent in budgets devoted to climate change at other ministries.
A recent article by Janice Kennedy in the Ottawa Citizen was headlined, “How will the future judge us?” She suggested, “Our children may be horrified when they look back on our world, just as we are when we look back on past generations.”
Even the recent past, she wrote, “is littered with behaviours that cause our enlightened contemporary jaws to drop.”
We used to sunbathe until we peeled, for example. We wiggled our toes in X-ray machines when we bought shoes. We smoked cigarettes, consumed huge quantities of fat, had unprotected sex, and travelled in cars without wearing seatbelts.
“Since the world of 50 years ago probably possessed no greater share of human stupidity than today\’s,” Kennedy opined, “the thought occurs that we… must also be doing a lot of dumb things.”
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Future generations, she suggested, may be appalled at the destruction of tropical rainforests. “You allowed crucial ecosystems to die, so that there could be more mining and logging?” she imagines those generations asking. “So you could eat more hamburgers?”
Those future generations – assuming there are any – might stare at pictures of gas-guzzling Hummers, and wonder how we could actually promote their use in a time of dwindling supplies.
“No one,” states my daughter firmly, “needs a Hummer.”
Indeed, as our dependence on plastic products increases, future generations may find it incredible that we actually burned our raw materials.
We don\’t X-ray feet any more. We discourage cigarette smoking. But we perpetuate other hazardous behaviours.
Back in the 1950s, the Korean War ended in an uneasy truce. Since then, we\’ve had the debacle of Viet Nam, the disintegration of Yugoslavia, the border disputes between India and Pakistan, wars of independence in southern Africa and tribal massacres in northern Africa, at least three wars in the Persian Gulf, and non-stop hostilities in the eastern Mediterranean.
I can\’t recall even one war with a clear winner. There have been plenty of losers, but no one has won a recent war.
Yet nations still plan for war, prepare for war, and go to war. As if wars solved anything.
In the first talking movie, The Jazz Singer, Al Jolson announced, “You ain\’t seen nothin\’ yet!”
He was right. We ain\’t. And unless we learn to adapt exponentially, we will be in deep trouble.
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Copyright © 2006 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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