Living on the Cliff Face

We are living in exponential times

This is a post with three (and a bit) book reviews. It started in 2021 during lockdowns, when I re-read the first book on the list, written over 50 years ago. I put off writing about it and then 2023 hit, and two more books helped bring the same message to the modern day.  But really, this is just a data point in time: Easter weekend, March 2024 (remember back then?). It's already disappearing in the rear view mirror.

Okay, mountain goats, here we go...

Book 0: Future Shock by Alvin Toffler (1970)

Future shock is a sickness which comes from too much change in too short a time. It's the feeling that nothing is permanent anymore. -- Orson Wells in a documentary of the same name.

Toffler had a knack for publishing books that captured and defined the megatrends of the day: The Third Wave (1980) correctly saw the end of the Industrial Revolution and the start of an information society.  Powershift (1990) can be summed up as "knowledge is power". The Adaptive Corporation (1985) described how organisations needed to rewire to keep up.  All of these are now givens; revolutionary at the time.

A recurring theme in the book is cultural fragmentation. He wrote in the year when the Beatles broke up.  The Sixties were tumultuous; music held it together with a limited number of radio stations to play a limited number of genres. Try to name all the genres out there now, and subcultures that have formed around them.

Future Shock discusses how traditional institutions and social structures are breaking down, and individuals are seeking more customised and diverse experiences. This leads to a shift away from mass production and consumption.  This is somewhat right although the consumer machine is still pumping away in these late-stage days.

The first thing I noticed when I picked up Future Shock again was its format: very short chapters in bite-sized concepts, much like following links on the Web.  He got an awful lot right; the only serious miss was that we would be living in underwater cities by 2000. 

Toffler discussed how the rapid advancement of technology and the explosion of information create a sense of overload and anxiety for individuals, struggling to process it all. He suggests that the constant exposure to new information and experiences leads to overstimulation and negative consequences for mental health and well-being.  The documentary Social Dilemma supports this theory, with disorders increasing since the mid-2000s and the rise of social media. Interestingly, the narrator Tristan Harris created a podcast one year ago called The AI Dilemma with similar warnings.

Toffler introduced the idea of the "prosumer," a combination of the producer and consumer. He predicted a shift toward a more personalised and participatory society where individuals have greater control over the products and services they consume.  This has come to be on YouTube and TikTok, just not in the way Sir Tim Berners-Lee envisioned when he invented the World Wide Web.

In the last section of the book Toffler suggests some coping strategies such as embracing lifelong learning and learning to be open minded.  Right again, just a wee bit difficult to implement for some who don't quite have that life-work balance thing figured out.

Book 1: Exponential by Azeem Azhar (2021)

I came across Mr Azhar while looking for a few newsletters to track AI For the Rest of Us that burst into our consciousness in November 2022. Azeem has a YouTube channel and access to influential people.  I've reposted some interviews on my LinkedIn feed.

The changes that occurred in the public eye between late 2022 and March 2023 when ChatGPT-4 was released were head-spinning, and the AI zeitgeist is still powering up.  Since you are reading this in the future, this is what we thought was amazing on the day I wrote these words.  I was going to post the difference a year makes between Midjourney versions, but it is already fading into irrelevance.

His book and his brand highlight that change in our lives is well past the bend in the hockey stick.  It is basically a series of recaps of near history, most of which are identifiable if you have been paying attention, so a good reference text (if that will matter next year).

 

Twenty years ago, in 2004, it took an entire year to install a single gigawatt of solar PV. By 2010, it took the world one month to install a gigawatt. By 2016, one week. Last year saw single days on which a gigawatt of solar PV was installed. 

The same thing has been happening for batteries – they have in fact been racing through doublings even faster than solar: five of them in the last eight years. In 2015, some 36GWh of lithium-ion batteries were produced; last year the total was around 1TWh. Over the past decade, cell costs have come down from $1,000 to $72 per kWh, and at the same time energy density has doubled and degradation per cycle has halved. We are also seeing new battery chemistries such as iron-air and sodium-ion that promise to be even cheaper than lithium-ion.

Some High School Math

(the rate of change of acceleration in calculus is a 'jerk').

The scariest exponential graph I've seen is world population, and I vow to write about this elephant in the room:

It is so extreme that even on a logarithmic scale, it is scary:

Anyway, rates of rates of rates of change, etc.  Our reptile brains are not equipped to cope.

Book 2: The Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleyman (Sept 2023)

Whereas Azeem tackles the difficult concept of exponential living, Mr Suleyman is a bit closer to the action and well suited to paint the near future.  He co-founded Google DeepMind, Inflection AI, and a week ago when this post was written (March 2024) left Inflection after just raising $1.3B to head up Microsoft's new AI division. 

Future Shock spoke from the effect on the individual; The Coming Wave looks at societal changes.  Suleyman's book has two halves: the changes happening everywhere, not just in AI, and then how nation-states will be affected.  In his youth he worked in the mayor's office in London, and then started a 'change consultancy' with the UN as one of his clients. Mitigating "fragility amplifiers" is his core thesis, with a recurring theme of 'containment'.  Containment is how do we have some control on the unleashed stressors, from the coming AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) to asymmetric warfare through drones, cyber attacks, to do-it-yourself dabblings in CRISPR (gene replacement therapy) in your garage.  Mustafa extrapolates far beyond other writers, forcing us to face the coming onslaught both good and bad.  Maybe we can find solace in some "anti-fragile" patterns.

He sees nation-states as essential to prevent utter chaos (giving modern-day Somalia and Lebanon as examples), a balancing act between catastrophe and totalitarian dystopia.  To be honest, he doesn't exude a lot of confidence in getting this right, but does state ten aspects that need to come together, including regulation, choke points (limiting NVIDIA's chips to China), alliances, and governance.  None of these seem particularly fast moving, especially compared to daily announcements.

Suleyman's has many valid points and utilises the Power of Three but could have used a tighter editor. Worth a read through to the middle and then in my case, a scan on the policy second half.

Bonus: Traveller's Rest by David I. Masson (1968)

In high school we had to read this short story, and I've forgotten about it for decades until I thought about it when talking to bookworm Chris.  And then Christmas 2023 I actually FOUND it again via a Google search (which I and others believe is getting rarer) from a Reddit post!  

It is only 26 pages long so there is not a lot of detail:  the main character "H" has been fighting at the front and given the nod to go home.  Most of the story is him descending to the lowlands; as he does his name gets longer!  He proceeds to have a life, raise children, until one day many years later he is asked to rejoin the fight; it has been ten minutes in the war zone.  The ending is brilliant (especially for my teenage mind). 

Although quite a different premise, there are some similarities with ST:TNG "Inner Light" (1992), the award-winning episode where Picard learns how to play a flute.

Afterword: The Singularity is Near

The term "singularity" as it applies to AI can be traced to SF writer Vernor Vinge, who passed away this month (a lot happened this month!). You can read his 1993 essay here, and does a pretty good job of predicting where this is going. This concept reached a larger audience with polymath and synth maker Ray Kurzweil's book The Singularity is Near in 2005.

At some point I formed the opinion (see my 2018 post "Artificial Intelligence has been gathering momentum our whole lives.") that AGI will happen in 2030, with ASI (Artificial Supra Intelligence) 30 minutes (!) later. ASI is effectively God and we become like ants. Based on the past eighteen months, I'm aligning with some people like Sam Altman and Mustafa Suleyman that AGI and self-awareness will happen much sooner; I'm thinking 2026. Let's see.