Time for Exponential Thinking

I've been sitting in a few Clubhouse chat rooms over the last few weeks listening to folks discussing AI, technology, and all the exciting things happening around the world (you can jump on any conversation..pretty amazing). Many of the conversations are focused on trying to solve social, economic, and environmental distortions that have quickly grown into huge problems. At the same time, I check in with the news media firmly fixated on the glacial movement of change in politics and wonder how these lawmakers (in the US, but around the world) are going to deal with the accelerating pace of change and complexity in our world.

We are probably past the point where we (all) societies need to rethink the concept of governance. Trying to write laws for every scenario to control and manage human behavior based on the desires of a narrow subset of interests is a zero-sum game. The idea that anyone can navigate policy (laws, regulations, guidelines, standards, ..) with any level of understanding about the impacts on other policies to say nothing about the impacts on an increasingly connected set of artificial and natural ecosystems may no longer be feasible.

The rate of growth and complexity in the last 50 years is nearly vertical compared to the first 10,000 years of our existence. The inequities being created by those clever enough to manipulate and seize control are bound to continue until we evolve our systems of governance.

We live in a world of exponential change and we are trying to apply linear thinking using discrete and disconnected sets of rules, subject to interpretation to manage complexity that is currently several orders of magnitude beyond what is now understandable humans and most systems.

Much of this growth is due to the introduction of technology, which continues to amplify change by doubling the computing power using silicon-based computing. (Moore's Law - number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit (IC) doubles about every two years). Ray Kurzweil has spoken about this for decades. Thus far, his predictions have held up very well.

The current trajectory shows that we should be able to achieve build human-brain capabilities in a machine within the next 25-30 years. But, Moore's Law may need to be revisited once quantum computing becomes mainstream (adopted for use by industry and institutions to replace/upgrade computing capabilities from integrated circuits).

What if quantum computing doubles the rate of change (which we are currently experiencing with integrated circuits)?

Attempting to apply top-down governance over all of these ecosystems simply takes too much time. We don't even have the ability to monitor change let alone understand the impacts, which exacerbates anxiety and creates increasing levels of uncertainty. People are increasingly worried about the concentration of power, computing, knowledge, and technology in fewer companies. Those few companies are consuming data at ever-increasing levels to train their AI.

Meanwhile, lawmakers (a term that may become antiquated in the not too distant future) struggle for control and wrestle with increasingly complex problems as if operating in a simplistic linear world. We are already behind the timeline curve for reimagining how to govern exponential change and complexity. All the more reason that we need exponential thinking and ideas to create a better world today so we can build a better future for everyone tomorrow.

In the next article, I'll share a few exponential ideas to address some of these problems and discuss ways of leveraging technology and information to help us understand and manage exponential change and complexity.