1965: technology improved at 2x per year

Most of us grew up after Moore’s Law (1965) changed the World with computing. The speed was 2x a year, and it produced the first personal computers, the Internet, smartphones, the cloud… We got used to this technological pace, and our senses expect the same pace we have always lived with. I was born in 1972, so that’s all I know.

2026: 100x per year

The system isn’t running at 2x anymore. Kurzweil predicted it 30 years ago. AI compute is growing by a factor of 100 a year, as the anonymous X account @r0ck3t23 pointed out with a video of Elon Musk agreeing with it.

I checked that 100x on Claude, and there is no source for it; apparently it’s more like x6… Behind the possible lie there is what we all feel: it’s near impossible to track the progress of AI, its applications, and consequences.

“Every generation assumes the speed it grew up with is the speed of history. Everything you build takes time. A child, a trade, a life’s work. All of it rests on the assumption that the world will still be recognizable when the work is finished.” Quote from the same anonymous account “Dustin.”

Sounds true. We can’t raise our children expecting the World is going to be quite the same when they graduate.

This pace of technology change makes it extremely difficult for most of us to understand the World we live in and how to prepare (us and our children, our businesses, our necessary skills, etc) for a future nearly impossible to predict. The only thing we can be certain of is how fast it is changing.

Confusion is the new normal.

The most important quality we can have and teach our children is being able to adapt to a possible 100x-per-year pace of change, because if technology changes at this pace, the world does too.

Stability is an illusion.

Forget stability, sense of security, and “safety”; they are all past qualities and are illusions anyway, as was well expressed by elders and philosophers.

Alan Watts wrote a whole book about it, “The Wisdom of Insecurity.” Seeking safety is what creates anxiety in a world that is always moving and changing. When he wrote this, the world was moving and changing way slower.

What’s behind our illusion of safety?

I am human and wrote this myself; I just checked for grammar.

Almost all humans are living entirely like machines. Everything they do is pre-conditioned by their parents, education, the culture they grew up in, etc.

Most humans lie all the time. They lie to others and lie first to themselves. They lie to themselves because they can only see their world through the lens of the above conditioning.

To see our lies to ourselves and others we need to get out of the program that turned us into machines.

It could be a a friend calling your bullshit, a teacher, a psychiatrist, a meditation retreat, psychedelics or other ways to get out of the default mode network. The next challenge once we see outside of the machine program is to keep the level of awareness to continuously see it and our own tendency to lie all of the time.

According to Gurdjieff you need a “shock” to see the illusion and your own lies. “I am spiritual” or “I am a good person” aren’t lies if the behavior goes with the words. Sadly most people don’t walk the path they claim to be on and their behavior is far from their words.

Wars for example could be avoided if all parties understood that they’re only acting on their own program that told them that their race, country or religion mattered or even existed. Countries are an illusion, nature did not create them, there is no need to fight for one’s country since it’s an illusion to begin with.

We could end wars if enough humans understood the program they are running on and how they’re lying constantly to themselves and others.