How dramatically the world can change within a lifetime

#114

Good morning from Berlin,

Today, just this single chart from Max Roser and his wonderful “Our World in Data” project, a scientific online publication that focuses on large global problems such as poverty, disease, hunger, climate change, war, existential risks, and inequality.

The visualisation above shows how unusual our time is. Technological change was extremely slow in the past. Today, we live in a time of extraordinarily fast technological change. “For recent generations, it was common for technologies that were unimaginable in their youth to become common later in life,” Roser writes.

And so it will probably happen in the future. Roser again: “I will likely see technologies in my lifetime that appear unimaginable to me today.”

But what kind of technology? Will it lead to the better? It is up to us, Roser argues. “We all should strive to gain the knowledge we need to contribute to an intelligent debate about the world we want to live in. To a large part, this means gaining the knowledge, and wisdom, on the question of which technologies we want.”

So let's all get wiser!

Strolling greetings,

Johannes Eber