?? Pressed for time: dealing with a compressed world

In today's edition we take a step back, and explore how a 30-year old concept helps us understand today's technological innovation - and how to deal with it.

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In his 1989 book, The Condition of Postmodernity, David Harvey introduced the idea of “time-space compression” to describe how advancing technology, communication, and globalisation would result in tangible changes in our societies. In turn, this would have subjective psychological effects of disorientation and alienation, amongst others. Future shock, in the terminology of Heidi and Alvin Toffler. Harvey and the Tofflers mirror some of my arguments in Exponential, although I emphasised the institutional framing of the issue.

The past six months have felt like a study in time-space compression, further and faster than the year before or the year before that. This is what we should expect in the Exponential Age. Let’s look at some of the most recent indicators.

Open-source LLMs are now only a few months behind proprietary ones as measured by benchmarks (which themselves have their limits). The UAE-based Technology Innovation Institute has just this week launched Falcon 180B, the most powerful open-source LLM to date. Equally, Huawei has been able to produce a powerful, modern smartphone with advanced connectivity despite the robust action taken against it by America and the enforcement of strong technology controls towards China.?

And it’s only going to continue. As the McKinsey analysis shows, estimates for the time until software systems can reach human-level performance have fallen dramatically. Over the past year and a quarter, the consensus, as evaluated on Metacalculus, for the first weakly general AI has come forward from 2042 to 2027.

As AI systems get better, expect even more time-space compression. The dynamics today are driven by familiar themes: the sharing of method and practice; global access to data, compute, and talent; and the traditional jostling of commercial and strategic competition. The systems being developed are still tools, yet to be turned systematically towards their own improvement.

Dealing with this compression is a big, complex challenge. We’re moving quickly but late to tackle what we might consider the institutional scaffolding for a new technology. EV reader, Ian Hogarth, is doing impressive work in assembling experts and framing challenges for the UK’s foundation model task force. (See community notes below.)

These are the mechanics of our system: just one aspect of what Harvey and the Tofflers explored (and the one I emphasised in my book). Another lens considers our subjective psychological response to this process (and it will be a persistent process, not a singular destination). Toffler suggested we’d need “islands of stability”, like familiar spaces, rituals or values. Harvey proposed, inter alia, the importance of local attachments and finding some way of accepting the ephemerality of the process.

My sense is that the frameworks, tools or ways of being we need to psychologically deal with this environment also require the kind of global and national initiatives that the technocratic safety engineering calls for. There don’t seem to be many structured efforts on what I suspect is an important piece of work. Psychologies that are driven by fear, instability and disorientation do not make for happy, stable societies.

What do you think? Comment below.

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