Raised for a World That No Longer Exists

There is the old world and the new world we are experimenting with now.

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.