“Anything can happen, and it happens really, really quickly.”
— Skier Mikaela Shiffrin, from “A Bump in the Road: In a stunner, Shiffrin skis out in the defense of her giant slalom gold” by Dave Sheinin, Washington Post (print version, page D1), 7 February 2022
“The extinction of the human race will come from its inability to emotionally comprehend the exponential function”
https://twitter.com/ryanstruyk/status/1263661094024994818

https://twitter.com/ryanstruyk/status/1263661094024994818

This “extinction of the human race” statement is often attributed to Edward Teller but I can't find a reference to a specific time or place he said or wrote it. The closest I can find is the statement “The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function,” by a Manhattan Project colleague of Mr. Teller, physicist Albert Allen Bartlett. See Arithmetic, Population and Energy: Sustainability 101 from Bartlett's website.

“When we balance out what’s more important, speed or accuracy, it’s not even a close call. We should be expecting accuracy and adjusting our expectations in regards to speed.”
— David Becker, Executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, in Iowa’s Lesson: Political Parties Are Not as Good as Government Officials at Counting Votes, by Jessica Huseman, Jack Gillum and Derek Willis, 4 February 2020
“Precisely because technology is now moving so fast, and parliaments and dictators alike are overwhelmed by data they cannot process quickly enough, present-day politicians are thinking on a far smaller scale than their predecessors a century ago. Consequently, in the early twenty-first century polities is bereft of grand visions.”
— Homo Deus, by Yavul Harari, 2015. Page 372

Meaningful Visions of the Future

“In the coming decades it is likely that we will see more Internet-like revolutions, in which technology steals a march on polities. Artificial intelligence and biotechnology might soon overhaul our societies and economies — and our bodies and minds too — but they are hardly a blip on the current political radar. Present-day democratic structures just cannot collect and process the relevant data fast enough, and most voters don’t understand biology and cybernetics well enough to form any pertinent opinions. Hence traditional democratic polities is losing control of events, and is failing to present us with meaningful visions of the future.”
Homo Deus, by Yavul Harari, 2015. Page 372

Long-term backwards vision

Instead of formulating meaningful visions for where humankind will be in 2050, [our leaders] repackage nostalgic fantasies about the past — and there’s a kind of competition: who can look back further. Trump wants to go back to the 1950s; Putin basically wants to go back to the Czarist Empire, and you have the Islamic State that wants to go back to seventh-century Arabia. Israel — they beat everybody. They want to go back 2,500 years to the age of the Bible, so we win. We have the longest-term vision backwards.
Israili historian and author Yuval Harari, from What’s Next for Humanity: Automation, New Morality and a ‘Global Useless Class’, by Kimiko de Freytas-Tamura, New York Times, 19 March 2018

The big stuff can never get done

“Any strategy that involves crossing a valley — accepting short-term losses to reach a higher hill in the distance — will soon be brought to a halt by the demands of a system that celebrates short-term gains and tolerates stagnation, but condemns anything else as failure. In short, a world where big stuff can never get done.”
Innovation Starvation by Neal Stephenson, Wired, 27 October 2011

Slow to change, hard to kill

…Perhaps the most salient feature [of cities] is how relatively slowly fundamental change actually occurs.

Cities that were overperforming in the 1960s, such as Bridgeport and San Jose, tend to remain rich and innovative today, whereas cities that were underperforming in the 1960s, such as Brownsville, are still near the bottom of the rankings.

Roughly speaking, all cities rise and fall together, or to put it bluntly: if a city was doing well in 1960 it’s likely to be doing well now, and if it was crappy then, it's likely to be crappy still.

Once a city has gained an advantage, or disadvantage, relative to its scaling expectation, this tends to be preserved over decades. In this sense, either for good or for bad, cities are remarkably robust and resilient—they are hard to change and almost impossible to kill. Think of, Detroit and New Orleans, and more drastically of Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, all of which have to varying degrees survived what were perceived as major threats to their very existence. All are actually doing fine and will be around for a very long time.

It takes decades for significant change to be realized. This has serious implications for urban policy and leadership because the timescale of political processes by which decisions about a city’s future are made is at best just a few years, and for most politicians two years is infinity. Nowadays, their success depends on rapid returns and instant gratification in order to conform to political pressures and the demands of the electoral process. Very few mayors can afford to think in a time frame of twenty to fifty years and put their major efforts toward promoting strategies that will leave a truly long-term legacy of significant achievement.

Scale: The universal laws of life, growth, and death in organisms, cities, and companies by Geoffrey West, 2017. Part 9. The Structure Of Wealth, Innovation, Crime, And Resilience: The Individuality And Ranking Of Cities, page 354

Cities are time accelerator machines

…So it's hardly news that the pace of life has been accelerating, but what is surprising is that it has a universal character that can be quantified and verified by analyzing data. Furthermore, it can be understood scientifically using the mathematics of social networks by relating it to the positive feedback mechanisms that enhance creativity and innovation, and which are the source of the many benefits and costs of social interaction and urbanization.

In this sense cities are time accelerator machines. The contraction of socioeconomic time is one of the most remarkable and far-reaching features of modern existence.

Scale: The universal laws of life, growth, and death in organisms, cities, and companies by Geoffrey West, 2017. Page 328.

Effectively forgotten

“We have proved the commercial profit of sun power. . . and have more particularly proved that after our stores of oil and coal are exhausted the human race can receive unlimited power from the rays of the sun.”
— Inventor Frank Schuman, 1916, as quoted in the New York Times: American Inventor Uses Egypt's Sun for Power — Appliance Concentrates the Heat Rays and Produces Steam, Which Can Be Used to Drive Irrigation Pumps in Hot Climates (uncredited author), 2 July 1916

In 1897 Frank Schuman prototyped a solar energy generator, to great acclaim. But, as Benjamin West, in his book Scale, observes, “The discovery and development of cheap oil in the 1930s discouraged the advancement of solar energy, and Shuman’s vision and basic design were effectively forgotten until the first energy crises of the 1970s.”

Europeana Keynote

marshmello-keynote-thumbnail.png

My keynote on speed, change, and resilience for the Europeana Annual General Meeting in Lisbon today. (Actually, “keynote” seems so… lofty…It’s more accurately a 10 minute talk from my cold and windy back yard.)

Here’s the text of the talk too (.pdf).

Europeana is Europe’s digital cultural aggregator, providing public access to tens of millions of cultural resources from over 3,000 partner institutions. For as long as I can remember it has been a leader in the global movement to “open up” cultural collections and resources and share them with the world. #allezCulture #Europeana2019

P.S. This link goes to a playlist of two videos.
The first video (“unlisted”, because of copyright) is a compilation/supercut of,

The second video is my short, backyard talk ;)

More links and references, particularly regarding AI and culture, in this presentation, Robot vs. Human: Who Will Win from the VIII St. Petersburg International Cultural Festival, and also in Culture for All, from the Prague Platform for the Future of Cultural Heritage.

Or suffer the consequences

It’s working… But the question is, is it working fast enough? Paraphrasing the great abolitionist leader Theodore Parker, Martin Luther King Jr. used to regularly end his speeches with the phrase “the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.” The line was a favorite of Obama’s too, and for all three men it meant the same thing: “This may take a while, but we’re going to win.” For most political fights, it is the simultaneously frustrating and inspiring truth. But not for climate change. The arc of the physical universe appears to be short, and it bends toward heat. Win soon or suffer the consequences. 
Winning Slowly Is the Same as Losing: The technology exists to combat climate change – what will it take to get our leaders to act?, by Bill McKibben, Rolling Stone, 1 December 2017