Humanity & Page 701
In late 2017, Tim Urban from the blog Wait But Why joined The Tim Ferriss Show (episode #283) to discuss, among other things, trying to predict the future and what it means for humanity.
Before offering his perspective, Mr. Urban first gives the audience a crash course in human history, analogizing it to a 700-page book with each page covering roughly 200 years. This minimally edited transcript of Urban’s soliloquy will catch you up on the last 140,000 years. Buckle up.
“So Page 1 through 650 of that book, [humans are] hunter-gatherers. If you’re an alien reading this book, trying to understand what happened on this planet, you are booorrreeedd. This is really boring. Page 650 — 10,000 years ago — you have the agriculture revolution. Suddenly people are coming together and forming cities; they’re starting to actually form larger civilizations. They have a collective intelligence that’s starting to form. They can compare notes. They can kind of create the knowledge tower that is bigger than any one of them.
Very interesting stuff. So that’s 50 pages ago. Then, it gets boring again for a while. Page 690 out of 700, the little tiny end of the book here, you have Jesus. On 693, you have the advent of Islam. The Roman Empire happened two pages ago, it’s already done. On 697, you have Imperialism. For the first time, you have countries, this new thing that’s happened over last three pages. Page 698, you have The Enlightenment, you have The Renaissance. They discover that there are galaxies, the telescope. Page 699, you finally get to the beginning of the U.S. and the beginning of the constitutional democracies.
Now, Page 700 happens, which is from about 200 years ago to today.
So, the beginning of Page 700. The alien turns the page, and the Industrial Revolution happens. Big deal, big change. And as he reads down the page, things start to go crazy. For 699 pages, this alien has read about this boring-ass species that’s communicated through letters and talking — he was excited about language 500 pages ago, now he’s bored again.
Suddenly, on Page 700, we go to the space station, we have the moon, we have airplanes, we have cars — just on Page 700. For 699 pages we have simple, basic communications. Now we have FaceTime, we have the telephone, we have the internet. Less than a billion people for the first 699 pages; on Page 700 alone, we cross the one, two, three, four, five, six and seven billion person marks.
So the alien’s reading, and his wife comes in and is like, hey we’re going to dinner soon. And he’s like, shhhh shut up shut up. This is the most riveting thing suddenly! He’s like, what’s about to happen to this species? This is crazy, what just happened on this page.
This is when we’re born. We’re born at the end of Page 700. This is why, when someone asks me about the future, I’m like, Page 701?! There’s no way it’s not going to be nuts.
The first three sentences of Page 701 will take us to 2025, when they predict that AI is going to, basically, infiltrate every single industry and part of our lives the way electricity did in a 10 year span in the 1880s. That’s the first three sentences.
So, to me, I see revolutions. The first half of Page 701, the first quarter of Page 701, I see revolutions in VR, AR. I see revolutions in AI. I see revolutions in brain machine interfaces. We’re going to be able to think thoughts to each other. It’s way cooler for language, for the first time.
I see revolutions in genetic stuff. Your grand-kids are going to be like, so…you just had a baby and hoped it was a good baby? It’s going to seem crazy. It’s going to seem so primitive.
Have you caught your breath?
Take a book down off your shelf and thumb through the pages. Now what do you think is going to happen next?
One thought on “Humanity & Page 701”
This was a fantastic excerpt. Reminds me of a JFK speech at rice university where he describes the span of human history as only 50 years.
“No man can fully grasp how far and how fast we have come, but condense, if you will, the 50,000 years of man¹s recorded history in a time span of but a half-century. Stated in these terms, we know very little about the first 40 years, except at the end of them advanced man had learned to use the skins of animals to cover them. ”
It goes on past this, but the idea that comes across is that everything we know of as history was only in the last few years (according to the analogy).