Mind the Adaptation Gap: Why the Late-Stage Information Age is a Time of Great Peril
I’ve spent a lot of time ruminating during the past few weeks, and I’ve concluded that many of you are too polite to tell me what I’ve been doing wrong. I thank you for your empathy and kindness, but I would not have objected to a constructive chastening. I wouldn’t want anything too harsh – I’m not a masochist – but a gentle nudge in the right direction wouldn’t have offended me.
So, what have I been doing wrong? Well, I fear that I’ve made the error of attempting to apply logic and reason to a world that has rapidly spiraled into extremes of illogicality and irrationality.
I’m not alluding here to the narrow straits of partisan politics, which are always roiled by naked ambition and primal passion. No, that realm is always a cracked, bifurcated mirror of distortion and manipulation. No matter how much you try, you can’t make sense of it; all you can do is follow the grimy money trails, see where the big bets have been placed, and then employ your powers of deductive reasoning from there. Besides, dysfunctional politics are merely a symptom of a more pernicious disease.
What I’m referring to is a phenomenon that goes well beyond the histrionic performance art of partisan politics. I’m talking about a technology-induced crack-up that has been a long time coming but is now building to crashing denouement.
I have a theory that technological revolutions, represented by major advances in science and technology, invariably result in severe economic, psychological, political, and social dislocations. These fractures have historically occurred at different times in different places, for the world was starkly divided into regions that were experiencing, for example, rapid industrialization while others remained largely agrarian.
Today, thanks to the ubiquity and immediacy of modern communications technology (the networks that I grew to know so well), everywhere, everything, and everyone is connected. Commerce and communication flows in real time, ceaselessly, allowing business and people to operate at unprecedented scale and speeds. That’s usually a good thing, of course – up to a point, anyway.
Regardless of the inherent limitations of genAI, which we’ve discussed previously on many occasions, and irrespective of when artificial general intelligence eventually takes cogent shape, we cannot deny that a form of automated intelligence is creeping across our professional and geographic landscapes.
There’s a partial failure in some quarters to grasp the varieties of AI as evolutionary advances belonging to automation. Nonetheless, intelligent automation is what industries, businesses, and people are ultimately buying into. In itself, AI, regardless of the flavor, is just an indispensable ingredient, an invaluable mechanism, a critical means to an end. The end, however, is increasingly capable, exceptionally intelligent automation. That’s what business buyers want. They want to automate wherever they can, so that they can save money and gain velocity in the ongoing quest for innovation and competitive advantage.
We Can’t Keep Up
The problem is, the vast majority of humanity, individually and collectively, can’t move or adapt at the pace and rhythm of technological breakthroughs. Our evolutionary and genetic advances are slower than our technological advances; we stubbornly retain atavistic traits and learned behaviors that take generations to resolve into a stable accommodation with tech-driven change.
We’re in a volatile period now, and the volatility is everywhere. These periods of epochal volatility can be exciting, but they’re also extremely perilous, partly because so many of us don’t realize that we’re fitfully crossing a major techno-social chasm. We’re moving forward while using a compass designed for the past. We’ve yet to devise the means of making sense of this new social landscape induced by technological advance.
Technological advance is agile, sudden, moving in vast leaps and bounds. Societal change is slower, laborious, and tentative. What we used to, achieving measures of success, doesn’t seem to work as well now. We have to feel our way forward to new adaptive concepts, ideas, and methods. This sort of adaptation doesn’t move at the speed of light; it’s not supersonic. It seems to crawl in comparison with the blinding advances of technology, particularly during a period of revolutionary change.
How can we, and how will we, adapt? It’s hard to say, but what you’re seeing now are the sloppy early innings of a game that will become more graceful and proficient with time. The problem is, what will fill the interregnum between where we were before and the destination ahead, wherever it might be. These are the periods, involving major dislocation and disjuncture, that are the most fraught, the most perilous. Even our authority figures, the people at the top of the hierarchies of government and industry who set the agenda and direction for our societies, have little idea of how to navigate this unfamiliar terrain. Like the rest of us, they lurch forward, stumbling and staggering across foreign ground.
In an ironic and paradoxical gesture, I asked a few different genAI bots about the latency gap of societal adaptation to massive technological change. As you might imagine, some (but not all) of the bots are sanguine. To avoid the trap of anthropomorphism, I suppose I should instead say that the bots evince sanguinity; they suggest that humanity, in its own time, has always managed to successfully navigate societal transitions triggered by technological advances. Further, the genAI bots posit that our societies always benefit in the long run, not only economically but also in relation to political stability and overall wellbeing. That’s been generally true in the past, and perhaps I should share in the bots’ (or their programmers’, or their data sources’) guarded optimism about humanity’s innate capacity to muddle through on the uneven path to a brighter tomorrow.
Actually, if I envision a long runway that stretches well into an opaque future, I do believe we’ll muddle through and arrive at something approximating an adequate resolution. It won’t be perfect, of course, because it never was and never is. There will always be seemingly insoluble challenges, vexing disparities and inequities, and old and new societal problems.
Past as Prologue
To reach that imperfect but tolerable future, though, we have to pass through a wrenching transitional period where the shocks and aftershocks of profound change will result in potentially grave consequences. In this regard, the past serves as instructional if paradoxical prologue. Let’s go back so that we can fast forward.
The Industrial Revolution had growing pains that included acute and protracted conflicts, various insurrections, widespread immiseration, and waves of social unrest. Historians differ on the dates that mark the beginning and end of the Industrial Revolution, but the approximate consensus is that it began in the late 18th century and lasted, through a succession of phases, well into the early decades of the 20th century. The Industrial Revolution was characterized by rolling waves of scientific and technological advances, beginning (roughly speaking) with the invention of the steam engine by James Watt in 1760, which triggered the mechanization (a form of automation) of textile production.
In the late 19th century and early 20th century, electricity and the internal combustion engine were adopted, followed by industrial mass production and the assembly line. (Electricity, at least the supply thereof, is now coming to the fore again as a consequence of AI's dissolute energy consumption.)
One could arguably make the case that societal inability to absorb and assimilate technological advances and industrial changes contributed to the outbreak of the First World War. Consider the factors that came to the fore: modern militarization and the first international arms race (in Europe); intensifying international economic competition between and among European empires, some of which were waxing and some waning; social unrest and strident nationalization, often manipulated by self-serving demagogues. These changes meant that the fruits of industrialization were bittersweet, with the bad often preceding or attending the good.
What I want to suggest here is that the industrial and technological changes of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were significant precursors that set the geopolitical stage for the outbreak of World War I. Put different, the sociopolitical and geopolitical shockwaves loosed by the Industrial Revolution were, in retrospect, meaningful contributors to the First World War.
Now let’s move forward to the contemporary context.
We are today in an accelerating Information Age, which arguably started in the late 1980s or 1990s and has persisted to where we find ourselves today. Some historians say the advent of the Information Age dates to 1947, coinciding with the invention of the transistor. That breakthrough necessarily begot others, including the birth and growth of the personal computer and rise of the Internet and the World Wide Web. Many knowledgeable observers would agree that we’re now in a mature period, or late stage, of the Information Age, exemplified by the ubiquity of connected, networked devices, sophisticated analytics, and AI-driven intelligent automation.
Unsettling Analogies, Troubling Patterns
These purely technological advances necessarily interact with economic, social, and political environments, not just in one country or region but globally. In real time, we’re witnessing many societal ramifications that make our times analogous, in many respects, to the years that preceded the First World War.
For example, we are witnessing a technological arms race and the rise of new military technologies such as autonomous weapons, cyberwarfare, and the militarization of space. In addition, we are experiencing a rising tide of information warfare, including misinformation, disinformation, and digital propaganda. On the domestic fronts, in various countries and regions, we can see the economic impact of deepening digital divides, resulting in mounting inequity and stark wealth disparities, occasionally prompting social instability and unrest. Amid everything else, we see challenges to established institutions at home and abroad, including difficulties maintaining and managing coherent global governance.
It's hard to see the patterns when you’re living up close and personal in the teeming grooves, but if you detach yourself and get some distance, in time if not in space, you can see enough similarities from the past to engender unease about our near-term future.
In light of what I’ve written just now, maybe I should revisit the opening paragraph of this post. Perhaps there is value in taking a logical, reasoned approach toward understanding the apparent madness and tumult in the world today. Perhaps there’s even a way for the (relatively) reasonable and the rational among us to play a role in helping us to navigate the treacherous times ahead. I’d like to think so, anyway.
Nonetheless, the first step in that direction must necessarily involve a candid diagnosis of our current difficulties. If my earlier analogy withstands scrutiny, we’ll need to tread carefully and cautiously across a treacherous transitional landscape. We’ll have to understand that humanity’s halting adaptation to profound and sweeping technological change will appreciably trail the pace at which technology avails itself to us as productive and destructive artefacts and implements. In the meantime – as our minds, sensibilities, societies, and institutions adjust to the blinding light of new possibilities, both benign and malign – acknowledging our collective obtuseness might help us get through the storm relatively unscathed.