Are We Advancing too Fast?

Have you ever noticed how we learn about history with increasingly fine and minute periods of study? Isn't that odd? We go from broadly discussing the seemingly snail pace of human advancement ten thousand years ago to splitting the Roman Empire into two periods. Then we examine the 15th, 16th, 17th and 18th centuries as hundred block periods. Sometimes we take a brief intermission, taking in the world wars year by year, emerging on the other end looking at history by decade. All the way to contemporary society, where we remark on specific years in the last few decades that gave birth to some notable event or historic invention.

Doesn't it feel like more has happened in the last, say, 30 years than any other 30 year period in history? We have gone from the invention of the world wide web, all the way to today's mind bogglingly thin tiny screens in our pocket that can instantly connect us to any page, any person, or anything we so desire. By comparison, in 1776, the first prototype for a submarine, which would need much more than 100 years to fully develop and much longer for widespread use, is only followed up a little less than 30 years later by a hand crank that separates cotton seeds from cotton fibers. That is the late 18th century. Long before that, we studied the advancement of ancient civilizations in ten thousand year periods, marking the development of agriculture followed by what seems to be a millennium of silence.

Why? I am inclined to assume what I am about to say is common knowledge, but considering how I felt when I first discovered this as a child, allow me to be a bit theatrical. It provides a nice starting point to tackle this question and might be interesting if you are unaware. There are quite a few uncontacted, isolated primitive human tribes remaining on the planet, perfectly preserved time capsules of ancient years your history teachers would have you believe are buried deep in the past by eons and eons. These are people living as close to early humans as we could possibly observe in the year 2025. Wrap your mind around that. You could buy a plane ticket right now, fly to Brazil, sail up the Amazon River and float back down the way you came with a wooden arrow in your chest. Yes, most of them are not very friendly. You would also have violated Brazilian law too, but it would certainly make a great story. The point is that undisturbed, these tribes are complacent.

I have seen many suggest their lack of outreach is cruel and immoral as we withhold our cornucopia of modern inventions. But these uncontacted peoples are content, aggressively so. What can we even do? The headlines showing the militant resistance of these uncontacted tribes are certainly eye catching, but that is not even always the case. There are so called tribes well acquainted with modern society that are dedicated to preserving their way of life, their culture, their rich customs, even if it means that for an extreme example a spice will be chosen over a vaccine.

But why are they so conservative? For politically conscious people, detach yourself from the connotations you have with the word conservatism and take a step back. The ideology is rooted in people like this that see nothing wrong with the status quo. There is nothing to aspire to if you are happy with the wild banana harvest of the Amazon. Change objectively carries some stress for all humans, so why bother? Why not conserve the peaceful existence you have? After all, who knows what lies ahead? What if it is worse than what you have now? And you have got to think it probably is, considering how fulfilled your current lifestyle makes you. After all, we are literally hardwired to gain pleasure from successfully living off of the earth. If we did not, we would not have been a viable species.

Maybe we have just done fewer notable things and made less technological progress for so long, not necessarily for some empirical, objective reason. Maybe we are looking at the problem entirely wrong, through a modern lens. As a high schooler, I know a lot of people who would choose a 13th grade if it existed. Given the option between that and starting college or trying something new, they would probably stick with the extra year even though it means missing other opportunities. Maybe what made us a successful species, receiving positive feedback for survival, hindered our growth. It is often trumpeted around that humans triumphed over Neanderthals because we would go forth venturing into the unknown. That is a bit optimistic. I think we may have had at best curiosity and at worst the suicidal impulse to survive in the tundra. But we had nothing greater to aspire to, really. It is not like we had a score, a goal, no outside factors to force a sword, no problems to solve.

What I am approaching is that these civilizations representing the world thousands of years ago did not and probably will never have the necessary ingredients to drive organic technological advancement. Like, say, fierce rivalries where one country has to repeatedly one up the other. They do not have easily interconnected booming urban towns where ideas like meritocracy and inventions like gunpowder can trickle in from the east ten thousand miles away. They do not have a need to innovate to meet an increasing demand for food. Everyone spends most of the day working to fulfill that need anyway. But at the same time, they do not have an overabundance that would allow a progressively more complex specialization and invention.

Point in case, compare Mesoamerica with these tribes in Brazil that have existed for tens of thousands of years. It is a widespread misconception that in the 16th century the Aztecs and Mayans were savages with a few fluke urban centers. At the very least, it is a misconception in the way that some people can only name the wacky calendar as a Native American invention that was ahead of its time. When in reality they were making plenty more unheard of discoveries in their booming grand cities, which would eventually crumble alongside its people, succumbing to European disease.

The geography and food density of the Amazon, among a variety of other factors, was just not conducive to urbanization. And urbanization is required for specialization, and specialization is the causation of the sensation of automation and innovation to end starvation, stagnation and migration, and the fixation of the aggregation of the nation in various technologically advanced urban centers that seem to just not sprout up in South America outside of the Incan Empire.

How does this tie into the broadly interconnected world? Forgive my bias, but let us start where AP Modern World History starts, giving a little bit of background, though oversimplification warning. In the time before the plague, Europe was a land of barbarians. Rome itself had fallen to savages multiple times, and for centuries Norsemen and Germanic raiders had forced isolated, fortified, hostile communities under a necessary rigidly militaristic social and political hierarchy. Lords and their serf filled manors constituted what barely passed as Western civilization at the time.

Now let us go for a lightning round to the modern day. The Black Death created labor shortages, raised the standard of living across the continent and drastically improved wages. These changes fractured the binding system of feudalism, many serfs finding themselves free, many nobles finding their families dead and their coffers empty. Wind power, water power and animal power began to blossom. At the time, newfound and widespread social mobility led to a flourishing of individualism, humanism, secularism and all the other isms conducive to societal progress.

Wealth was concentrated in fewer, freer individuals who were suddenly very interested in not only studying the scientific works of antiquity but improving upon them. The coal mines kept flooding. Maybe we could pump them out. Maybe burn the on-site coal to create a pressure difference to pump a piston. Steam engine. As the forests began to thin out and the English supply of charcoal was depleting, industry in Britain had to seek a different fuel source: coal.

At the same time, fierce colonial competitions and untapped markets thriving east and west were bringing in sugar, tobacco, cotton, cocoa and more. Refineries had to be built. Then more people needed food. Then more farms needed people. Another agricultural revolution took place. Proto industrialized agriculture created surplus workers. They went to the factories. Wages rose. Those urban factory workers wanted luxury goods. More factories were built. Resources ran low. Rubber was sought with crimes against humanity. Nationalism, imperialism, militarism. Then an Austrian died. War erupted.

Some would call this the chemist war due to the invention and horrific use of high explosives and chemical weapons. Technology was shoved to the forefront with the sole intent of ending the lives of other humans in the cruelest ways imaginable. In the next global war, we topped poison gas with the atomic bomb.

For half a century afterward, the top two global superpowers accelerated technological progress to such an insane, mind boggling extent that humanity achieved space travel which otherwise probably would have taken many centuries more to organically begin, all in the name of clout.

From vast urban societies that allow intellectuals to flourish and solve problems to global rivalries and interconnected markets, the world created accelerating cycles of innovation. Engineers and entrepreneurs confronted new problems only made possible by earlier human inventions. It appears as though technological progress should be exponential. It seems almost fractal.

Software provides a microcosm. Computers went from giant boxes to sleek laptops. Brilliant people made their own contributions, sometimes piggybacking off established inventions and sometimes seeking their own personal innovation.

This slides into contemporary society, the most potent example of the opening question. We do not exactly have a cutthroat global competition right now, but we live in a relative calm. Imagine getting drafted at 18 to go die in a war between modern European superpowers.

You might expect me to say that the 21st century is a perfect sort of technological advancement for a multitude of reasons that do not include fierce competition. Maybe I would dive into whether capitalism creates niches to fulfill. Maybe I would develop that claim that technological progress is fractal and exponential and we have reached a critical mass. Maybe I would tie this all back in a more literal way and acknowledge that I have just been looking at technology, not entirely addressing the vague question: has more happened in the last few decades?

Maybe I could talk about population. Our progress seems exponential, but so is our population. Could technological progress truly be exponential? That would imply we are gearing up for immense rapid technological advancement, and that makes me feel insignificant and apprehensive. But what if it is recency bias, the tendency to place more importance on events the more recent they are?

Computers and drones are relatively new, but they are built upon years of innovation. We take metallurgy, precision engineering and electrochemistry for granted. Those inventions were probably as life changing as computers. At the beginning I pointed at the cotton gin to laugh at it, but that was cherry picking. I could have said vaccination instead.

In 1440 Gutenberg invented the printing press. Ten years later spectacles appeared. Twenty years after that muzzle loaded rifles changed warfare forever. In another world I could have made this essay two hundred years in the future and said that at the turn of the 21st century in thirty years we went from Tickle Me Elmo and a singing bass to whatever modern inventions exist then. I could have made a similar argument in the 1400s. The only difference would be that it would be a manuscript, not a video, and more racist regarding so called uncivilized tribes.

By now you must have realized that I am playing both sides for the sake of a counterargument. Every essay needs one. So what is the real answer?

It is entirely a fantasy to juxtapose short bursts of renaissance inventions to the modern eruption of technology. It would be a fallacy to compare inventions chronologically without acknowledging fractalization. No amount of cherry picking gives a complete picture because it is lopsided, heavily skewed in favor of the almost five billion patents the United States alone awarded from 2000 to 2019. Even if 0.1 percent of those inventions are major, that is still millions in the last twenty years.

We also ignore the huge world population. If there were one Plato per the population of his time, we would have 43 Platos today. Socrates and Aristotle were his contemporaries. Think about the would be polymaths stuck in fields all their lives.

This leads into the uncontroversial topic of political, social and economic systems. No matter how you look at it, human civilization is the freest it has ever been. We have legally triumphed over massive institutions from the slave trade to serfdom. Compulsory education only picked up steam a hundred years ago.

We are curious, forever venturing into the unknown, but we are not entirely foolish. We are not lost in the tundra. Rivalries and macro problems accelerate progress, sure, but that is not the true answer. These uncontacted tribes presumably have had clan feuds and wars. They have faced climate change and food mismanagement. They have had chances to absorb outside influence.

I teased it earlier, but I really do think we are at a critical mass, if not of population, then of invention. As one thinker said, as our circle of knowledge expands, so too does the circumference of darkness surrounding it. The more we push forward, the further it seems we can go.

And that is exactly what we are doing.