How Much Technology Can Humanity Handle? A lot.

Photo by Quaid Lagan on Unsplash

Feeling a little overwhelmed with the seemingly endless declarations of A.I. changing everything, everywhere all at once? The tsunami of productivity apps foisted on us at work? Just this one more collaboration app and we will be in productivity heaven? The metaverse, crypto, Web3, drones, robots, DNA ancestry. How much technology can we handle?

First I’ll take a look at how we arrived at today, then I’ll look at how much we can handle and why we can handle more than we might think.

As I’ve written previously, human societies used to have a fair bit of time and space between them to figure out how they wanted to adopt, adapt and evolve various technologies. From the wheel until most recently, the telephone.

We could say that technologies began spreading faster throughout the world’s societies around the time of the printing press. The press allowed a faster and more accessible route to knowledge. Both the creation and sharing of it. The spread of printed books was enabled by advancements in transportation technology. The sailing ship.

While information technologies from all the stuff that makes the internet and mobile networks work, to data centres, PCs and such have advanced rapidly, transportation technologies have not. They have, to a large degree, plateaued. In part because if we…