The Acceleration of Progress

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For most of human history, change moved at a pace barely perceptible within a single lifetime. Palaeontologists examining tools from the Old Stone Age cannot date them by their shapes to an accuracy better than many thousands of years—tools simply didn't improve any faster than that.

Even in ancient Rome or Egypt, technological artifacts might be dated to the nearest century at best.

But examine the cars and computers of today, and historians of the future will easily date them to the nearest decade, or in the case of computer technology, to the nearest year or less.

Progress itself is accelerating.

The rate at which we improve our tools, our technologies, our understanding—it's not constant. It's exponential. What once took millennia now takes decades. What once took centuries now takes years. We live in a moment where the pace of change has become visible within a single human life, where a child's world looks fundamentally different from their grandparents'.

The tools we use to measure time have become the very thing being measured.