How will you keep up? The Epoch of Humans is going to be a rough ride
On Campbell Island, 600km south of New Zealand’s South Island, stands a tree that is unusual in many respects. It is a Sitka spruce, which is mostly found in northwestern America, half a world away. Moreover, it’s not only this kind of tree that is rare to find here - It is the only tree on the island, and the next nearest is on another island almost 200km away.
But most importantly, it carries evidence of the start of the Anthropocene – the Epoch of Humans.
Starting around 1950, a number of related global trends that had been growing in linear terms suddenly took off. Population, especially urban population, real GDP, foreign direct investment, transportation, water and energy use, among many others, began to grow at exponential rates. This phenomenon, and its associated environmental impacts, has become known as the Great Acceleration and marks the start of what many scientists believe is a new epoch in earth’s history.
The tree sitting on Campbell Island is being considered as representing the start of the Anthropocene because, despite its remote location, it contains evidence of fallout from the testing of nuclear weapons. And few things represent the ability of humans to harness and destroy the natural environment as effectively as nuclear weapons.
But the start of the Anthropocene is perhaps of less interest than where the Great Acceleration is taking us. Because as much as humans like novelty, we’re not well suited to rapid change.
Yet as technology builds upon technology, unlocking new worlds of possibilities, there is little sign of a let-up in the increasing pace of change. The internet combined with decreasing data storage costs is fueling advances in artificial intelligence that promise to not just revolutionize our working and private lives, but also do it in an awful hurry.
As someone in the car industry recently told me, developments in transportation over the past 50 years will pale in comparison with those of the next five years. Not only that, but the future of work is coming into question, with numerous jobs, including in previously lucrative areas such as medicine, being increasingly automated.
Even so, I’m not worried about jobs. There will, for the foreseeable future at least, be plenty of value-creating occupations for people to engage in. What is more troubling is the transition that the Great Acceleration represents, which may well become a permanent state of flux.
In other words, how can individuals keep up with the increasing pace of change?
- Information is good, but we are now positively drowning in it. People are now expected to make more decisions, more quickly and based on more information than ever before. The increasing complexity of life is already making black-and-white solutions to difficult problems seem more appealing, such as building a wall on the U.S.-Mexican border or offering a yes/no referendum on the U.K.’s membership of the European Union. Will technology be able to help us better navigate the noise, or will more of us snap under the pressure?
- A battle is heating up for our attention, and our brains are the battleground. Enormous resources are being ploughed into understanding how brains are structured, the chemicals they produce and how they react to stimuli, all with the aim of manipulating our attention. We should probably worry less about our privacy and more about our focus.
- Social interactions are changing for good. We can now connect with more people from further way in more ways than ever before. Nevertheless, there is less opportunity to get to know people well, and social media seems to be replacing as much as augmenting relationships. It’s not clear yet that the rising quantity of interactions is making up for the decline in quality.
In some ways, it’s a little depressing that the tree on Campbell Island has been chosen to mark the indisputable arrival of humans on earth because of the artificially generated carbon radioisotopes it contains. Yet it also represents something quite important - its adaptability. This tree, alone on this island and many thousands of kilometers from its natural environment, has nevertheless managed to survive more than 100 years. Humans will need to demonstrate the same kind of resilience to make it to the next epoch.