Humanity will adapt again, as always!
Abstract
Humans have a drive to find new lands, blaze new trails, find new hunting grounds. This is deep in our psyche from evolution, maybe even in our DNA. Change is constant in human history, and each wave of innovation brings both excitement and anxiety. Today, AI is generating that same tension. But what does history really tell us about how humanity responds to radical transformation? The answer is more reassuring than we may think.
The Cycle of Change
Throughout history, humans have continually adapted to environmental and technological shifts, whether through evolving laws, corporate structures, or innovations like the steam engine. These shifts disrupt old ways of working, but they also spark new methods and efficiencies. As each major invention matures, it initiates a cycle: replace, adapt, adopt. This technology is inevitably replaced by a superior technology that is even more efficient. And we go through the cycle all over again.
The Effect of Change
While humans are natural innovators, we’re also creatures of habit. We crave predictability in our budgets, our jobs, even the stock market depends on it. Change introduces uncertainty, which activates our survival instincts. Some embrace it. Others resist. But beneath it all is the same question: How will this affect me? We wonder what will happen to us, to our lives, to our livelihoods. The fear is that of our own survival, and it is a primal one.
What Does History Show
There are many ways to show changes over time. I chose to look at “Compute Power” or the processing capacity of technology measured in Floating Point Operations Per Second (FLOPS). I asked an LLM to chart the compute power for major technological innovations over time. I was also curious about how these innovations affected peoples’ lives. The metric I chose for this was the Unemployment Rate, imperfect as it may be as a proxy for human impact. The overlay of these two was surprising. I had expected upheaval with technological transformations, but the graph below shows a much more benign picture.
The increase in compute power was so steep that we used a logarithmic scale to make the trend readable. It is also evident that the pace of introduction of change has increased with each new technology introduction occurring in a shorter timeframe.
Even with the blistering pace of change from the introduction of transformative technologies, the overall unemployment rate has remained relatively stable, except during the Great Depression, which economists largely attribute to financial mismanagement rather than technological disruption.
The bottom line is that human beings have absorbed tremendous technological change and have been very resilient through all of it. So, if history is our guide, we will work through this latest change and come out the other end without significant damage.
What’s Next?
AI is different in scale, speed, and scope, but so were the printing press, the steam engine, and the internet in their time. Some may argue that Artificial Intelligence is not the same and that it may completely replace human intelligence. If this occurs, then nothing anyone says matters. However, this is not what history has shown. Each technology creates existential fear until we understand and harness it. Once we do, we use it in better and different ways and create new jobs. I fully expect this to be the case with AI as well. At QuantumVision, we are designing tools not just for the AI era, but for the future of meaningful human work. Join us in shaping what’s next.
Sai Balakrishna
Managing Partner & CEO
📧 info@quantumvision-ai.com
🌐 www.quantumvision-ai.com
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