Future Shock

What's left to shock us about the future when we assume a compounding rate of technological change?

If you teleported a person from 350BC, the time of Alexander the Great, to the Roman Empire circa 80AD, they’d be surprised at all the changes but not too surprised - there’s larger temples, bigger cities, but people still mostly lived on farms, used horse-drawn wagons, blacksmiths forged metal tools with hammer and anvil. You’d be surprised at the scale and density of metropolitan areas but not at the size nor breadth of the Roman Empire - it would look quite familiar culturally to the empire of Alexander the Great and even of similar size.

If you transported a person from 1700’s to the modern day, they’d be utterly shocked. The pace of technological change has not just created drastic upheavals in what daily life looks like for a citizen, what jobs there are, what people talk about, but also the shape and rhythms of city life, where people get their food from, how they communicate and how they navigate the world. The idea of personal agentic freedom, of meritocracy, that a person born to relative obscurity could climb the ladder of society and live like a King - at least as surprising as the material world would be the dynamics of society have undergone at least as large an upheaval.

We live in a time where we take an accelerated pace of technological change for granted. Teleport a person 50 years into the future and what do they see? Not just robots everywhere and a space industry, but if you showed them a functioning wormhole teleporter system, anti-gravity propulsion methods, free energy producing devices, they’d very well nod their head and say “yep, I can see it, not too surprised there” - whats there left to shock us about the future after all?

I would contend that the biggest future shock in store for humanity thats grown accustomed to an insane pace of creative destruction in the economy isn’t in the built environment, but rather our emotional internal world, our social relationships, and how we derive meaning from our lives. Technology has overall lifted us from lives that are nasty, brutish, and short, and turned our attention from zero-sum games played at each others throats - think Game of Thrones - and towards positive sum games of mutual liberation.

A person from the past will not be out of place in the future because of the clothes they wear or the gadgets they use, but because they have come from a time of rather mindless consumerist consumption focused on satisfying hedonist urgers and into an era where material abundance and post-scarcity have rendered all of that moot and uninteresting. The frontier of society in a post-scarcity world is essentially increasing the degree of conscious awareness of the individual, finding meaning from pursuing things you love and not symbols of wealth or power, living a life of service to others rather than service to the self, finding a greater and more profound connection with the universe and its physical laws not just as wielders of technology but as living breathing creatures animated by the same laws that light up the stars in the night sky.

Achieving a higher degree of conscious awareness is the goal of any spiritual tradition or religous practice in its original form. Buddhism is by far the most explicit about this, through meditation, surrendering of the ego, feeling connection with the universe and one-ness with all. The original teachings of Jesus Christ, from which the modern Church has essentially fallen completely astray, embody this as well - the kingdom of Christ does not live in the heavens but is rather born inside the self when you can turn suffering into love and forgive your enemies.

The miracle of Jesus’s teachings is that they came at a time where material scarcity, starvation, disease, violence, were the norm. A time of vicious brutality. The future wrought by technological abundance makes this far more easier to achieve in practice since the incentives towards wielding power over others and exploiting them for personal gain start to erode. We will not live like animals steeped in fear at a cruel and uncaring world, where we struggle to survive. Liberated from fear and material privation there is no frontier left to develop apart from the one inside ourselves.