Sun Tzu

The pace of life is speeding up. Hardly the most startling statement. As most of us are only too aware, change comes more and more rapidly. Technological breakthroughs spread through society in years rather than centuries. Calculations that would have taken decades are now made in minutes. Communication that used to take months happens in seconds. Development in every area is happening more and more rapidly.

As a result more and more of us are living in the fast lane - many in overdrive. There is more information to absorb, more challenges to meet, more skills to learn, more tasks to accomplish. Yet the time to fit it all in seems to be getting less and less.

Worse still, there is no sign that things are slowing down. On the contrary, the pace of life is set to get faster and faster, taking us deeper and deeper into what Alvin Toffler called “Future Shock . . . the shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short a time.”

Will we be able to cope? This, argued Toffler, is the challenge facing us. To learn to handle ever-more rapid change without burning out or breaking down.

Not only is accelerating change putting us under stress, it is also putting increasing pressure on the planet. There are ever-growing numbers of us to feed, clothe, and house. Our waste is pouring into the air, the soil, and the seas many times faster than our environment can absorb it. Holes are appearing in the ozone layer, while forests are disappearing at alarming rates - as are the species that live in them. Seldom in its history has the earth changed so rapidly.

The faster the world around us changes, the more we are forced to let go of any cozy notions we might have of what the future will be like. No one today can predict with any degree of certainty how things will be in a year’s time, or even six months’time. When global stockmarkets can crash without warning, political walls crumble overnight, countries invade each other in a day, and ecological disasters shatter our illusions of control, we are forced more and more to live in the present.

To live with continued acceleration and all it brings will take more than simply learning to manage better. It will involve a complete revision of our thinking about who we are, what we really want, and what life is all about.

Looking back over history it is clear that acceleration is not just a twentieth-century phenomenon. Change occurs much faster today than it did a thousand years ago - medieval architecture and agriculture, for instance, varied very little over the period of a century. But even then change occurred much faster than it did in prehistoric times - Stone Age tools remained unchanged for thousands of years.

This gathering of pace is not confined to humanity; it is a pattern that stretches back through the history of life on Earth. According to currently accepted theories - and it is well worth remembering that most scientific theories change with time - human beings first appeared on Earth about a quarter-million years ago. Mammals started evolving much earlier, about 60 million years ago. And the first living cells appeared much earlier still - some 3.5 billion years ago.

Nor did the trend begin there. Before any living system could evolve other equally important developments had to occur. This too was an evolutionary process that accelerated.







If the pace of development continues to increase - and we shall see shortly that there is every reason to believe it will - then the amount of change that we have seen in the last twenty years will be compressed into the next ten years, or less, and after that into an even shorter time. This itself is not a new revelation - even so, it is not always taken into full account in our extrapolations into the future. However, such ever-accelerating has another, much more startling consequence - and one that is not usually considered at all.

We might imagine that this speeding up could continue a long way into the future; in a hundred years it would be much faster than it is now, and in a thousand years much faster still. But this sort of acceleration cannot continue forever. The timescales involved are getting shorter and shorter; from billions of years, to millions, to thousands, to centuries, and now to mere decades. Before very much longer it comes to an end. If you plot out the curve of this sort of acceleration you find that the curve soon approaches the vertical. In other words, the rate of change tends towards the infinitely rapid. Mathematicians call such a point a “singularity”; the equations break down and cease to have any useful meaning.

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To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit.- Stephen Hawking