In that context though, I think about our ancient ancestors and I’m struck not by the accelerating pace of change today, but by the incredibly slow pace of change throughout all of our human history up to now. Imagine homo-sapiens or Neanderthals on a sparsely populated planet. Every day they get up in the morning and it is the same as the day before. For years, decades, and generations, nothing changes. If they didn’t know how to make fire the day before, they weren’t going to know how to make fire the next day either. Stories could be passed down from generation to generation to generation about how the world was and how it had always been.
Change was imperceptible. Technical breakthroughs, changes in climate, changes in social norms; nothing changed at a detectable rate. For each generation it had to seem like nothing would ever change. There was no reason to think it ever would.
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