Let me guess. You are worried about the future. From your vantage point, civilization is hanging by a thread. Everyone seems to agree: the end is near.
The list of looming catastrophes is endless. Political polarization is tearing society apart. Artificial Intelligence (AI) will eliminate millions of jobs. Climate change is destroying the planet. Birth rates are collapsing across the developed world. Government debt is spiraling out of control. Young people are lonely. Older people are isolated. Institutional trust is dying. I’ve written about most of these things. You are not totally wrong, my friend.
It's enough to make you wonder if you were born in the final chapter of the human race. And yet I've noticed something interesting about history. Most of the disasters we're told will end the world never seem to, you know, end the world. It reminds me of Adams' Law of Slow-Moving Disasters. That is, most disasters move slowly enough that society has time to react.
The law is hardly scientific. There are no scientists involved. But it does seem to explain a recurring pattern in modern life. For decades, we've been distracted by predictions of imminent catastrophe.
When I was younger, predictions of mass starvation were common. Then agricultural productivity improved, technology advanced, and the world's population became wealthier and healthier than many experts had expected.
For a while, it seemed plausible that nuclear war would destroy the planet. During the Cold War, millions of people genuinely believed they might not live to old age. Then there were killer bees.
If you're under forty, you may not appreciate how much attention the killer bees received. They were advancing from South America. We were dead meat. The bees arrived. Civilization survived.
For years we've watched obesity and diabetes rates climb, with no end in sight. Then along came GLP-1 drugs, a development few people saw coming. It is dramatically altering the trajectory of both conditions. The future has a habit of introducing variables that are outside of our comprehension.
Whatever one's views on the severity of the problem, climate change is not a light bulb that just turned on. Focusing on innovation, sustainability, and conservation over the last twenty-five years is moving the needle.
The same is true of artificial intelligence. Predictions range from workplace efficiency to robots taking over the earth and killing all of us. The truth is somewhere in between. Falling fertility creates genuine economic and social challenges. But demographic change unfolds slowly enough that governments, businesses, and families have years to adjust their behavior.
The same pattern has repeated itself for generations. Acid rain. The ozone layer. Y2K. The Mayan calendar. Mad cow disease. Bird flu. Too big to fail. You get the point.
These problems didn’t happen overnight. They developed slowly enough to be observed, debated, studied, and eventually addressed. The ozone hole seemed terrifying. Then governments, scientists, and industries adapted.
“Most of the disasters we're told will end the world never seem to get around to ending the world.”
Doomsday predictions generally assume that human beings will continue behaving exactly as they are behaving today. History suggests otherwise. Adams’ Law of Slow-Moving Disasters suggests that when circumstances change, people adapt. Human beings are many things, but we are not a passive species.
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What fascinates me is that every generation seems convinced the world is on the edge of disaster. The details change, but the script remains remarkably consistent: “something is changing. People are uncomfortable. Therefore the world must be ending”. Blink twice if this sounds familiar.
Not every disaster moves slowly. World War One and Two arrived suddenly and inflicted enormous damage. But even after the introduction of nuclear weaponry, the world didn’t end,
“Many of the problems developed slowly enough to be observed, debated, studied, and eventually addressed.”
Problems can be real, serious, and worth addressing without implying the collapse of civilization. If the assumption is that human beings will remain frozen in place while problems accumulate around them, the prediction is flawed. (See if the messenger is wearing a tin foil hat.)
Everybody has one friend convinced the world is about to end. Maybe they need to read this article.
The future has always been uncertain. The difference today is that uncertainty arrives in real time, delivered to our phones every few minutes by people whose livelihoods depend on capturing our attention. Unfortunately technology expanded our awareness of problems far faster than our capacity to solve them.
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The world will face serious challenges in the coming decades. But if history is any guide, those challenges will arrive slowly enough for people to notice them, argue about them, and eventually begin adapting to them.
And that, more often than not, is how civilization managed to survive predictions of its imminent demise.
Like I said, I bet you worry about some of this stuff more than you should. Leave me a message by clicking the link below. I promise that you’ll hear back from me. AI hasn’t taken over Wit & Wisdom (yet). I’m still a real guy.
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