That is cool art.
Ergophobe, probably more like what a 1940s guy would react to today.
Maybe. We can't know. But there are a few holes I could poke in this
1. in terms of a hunter/gatherer being brought into 1750 society, we did that experiment with thousands upon thousands of slaves and they didn't die from technological shock. They died from disease or mistreatment. As recently as 1911 we did the experiment again and again, Ishi didn't die from technological shock, but from disease.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishi2. I think we're about the same age (52). As a kid, I remember all sorts of predictions about
- space travel - remember the show Space 1999? Uh... dude, where's my spaceship
- artificial intelligence - HAL: "Good morning Dave."
- evolution: moving toward no jaw, spindly arms and big heads because everything was becoming automated... then POOF Jane Fonda, Richard Simmons, the deification of Navy Seals, steroids in bodybuilding.
There was a great quote from Arthur C Clarke upon the landing of the first Mars Rover where he said "If someone had told me in 1969 that in 2000? we would land a toaster on Mars and consider it a triumph, I would never have believed it."
The key thing is that 35 years isn't that much. We just saw the release of the first new storage technology in 26(?) years since Flash/SSD. After 26 years we still mostly use spinning platters in most low to mid-range machines.
The second thing is that the trends we see at present aren't necessarily the ones that will continue, let alone exponentially.
At 52 I look at my "Alzheimer's Horizon." If they nail down the actual cause of it tomorrow, and they take five years to find a "cure" and it takes five years to bring to market, I'm in just under the wire. But they still don't know the cause (amyloid plaque may cause it or it may be a defense mechanism, they still don't know).
So I guess what I'm trying to say is that the exponential increase makes sense when projecting longer time frames, but over shorter time frames we can peer into the near future and see how hard it is to change.
Imagine, for example, a completely new source of energy appeared tomorrow. A new type of plant that large amounts of energy at very low cost with no pollution. How long would it take before the world was entirely off coal and natural gas generating facilities?
In my neighborhood it took ten years to get over the squabbling on how to fund the sewer treatment plant upgrade - so it took literally 11 years to deploy an existing technology to fix a pressing problem (raw sewage going into the creek and notices of violation from the state water board).
