What a Time To Be Alive

I am of the strong opinion that we live in the best period of time ever in the history of humanity. So when I come across passages that capture this sentiment I want to share them. The passage I share below is an excerpt from Ray Kurzweil's book The Singularity Is Nearer.

Without further ado:

"[C]ontrary to many popular assumptions, life is getting better in profound and fundamental ways for the great majority of people on earth. More importantly, this isn't just a coincidence. The vast improvements we've seen over the past two centuries in areas like literacy and education, sanitation, life expectancy, clean energy, poverty, violence, and democracy are all powered by the same underlying dynamic: information technology facilities its own advancement. This insight, which is the core of the law of accelerating returns explains the virtuous cycles that have transformed human life so dramatically...

Humanity's Journey toward easier, safer, and more abundant life for all has been progressing for years, decades, centuries, and millennia. We truly have trouble imagining what life was like even a century ago, let alone before that. Our accelerating progress, with substantial gains over the past few decades and profound evolution over the next few decades, will catapult us forward in this positive direction, far beyond what we can now imagine."

Kurzweil goes on to share a bunch of graphs to support his conclusion that I have provided below. Make sure you take a extra long look at the US and UK life expectancy graphs.

Beautiful... But why do many people still hold a pessimistic view of humanity's future?

Kurzweil has a nice explanation for that too:

"The problem is that news coverage systematically skews our perceptions about these trends. As any novelist or screenwriter can tell you, capturing an audience's interest usually requires an element of escalating danger or conflict. From ancient mythology to Star Wars, this is the pattern that grabs our brains. As a result - sometimes deliberately and sometimes quite organically - the news tries to emulate this paradigm. Social media algorithms, which are optimized to maximize emotional response to drive user engagement and thus ad revenue, exacerbate this even further. This creates a selection bias towards stories about looming crises while relegating the kinds of headliners cited at the beginning of this chapter to the bottom of our news feeds."

Kurzweil goes on to comment on the evolutionary predilection to be more attuned to loss and fear and less attuned to optimism:

"Our attraction to bad news is in fact an evolutionary adaptation. Historically it's been more important for our survival to pay attention to potential challenges. That rustling in the leaves might have been a predator, so it make sense to focus on the threat instead of the fact that your crops may have improved a tenth of a percent since the previous year."

Finally Kurzweil brings in the "availability heuristics", a mental shortcut where people judge the likelihood of an event based on how easily examples come to mind. If something is more memorable or recent, we tend to think it happens more often, even if that's not statistically true.

"For the reasons discussed previously the news and our news feeds emphasize the negative events, so it is these negative circumstances that come readily to mind.

That we should correct for these biases doesn't mean we should ignore or underestimate real problems, but it provides a strong rational ground for optimism about humanity's overall trajectory."

Often I need to encourage patients, family, and friends to unplug from the news and plug into starting to grasp the vastness of the universe and the improbability of our own existence. It can lead to sincere gratefulness and amazement with what it means to be alive at this time.

For me, this passage and collection of graphs harkens back to a prior post I published in May of 2024 where I share a quote from Richard Dawkins' book, Unweaving the Rainbow. I encourage you to check in out.

The Singularity Is Nearer

Kurzweil, R. (2024). The singularity is nearer: When we merge with AI. New York, NY: Penguin Books.