Vladimir Lenin reportedly observed that “there are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” Industrial revolutions and the surges of change they represent appear to fit this aphorism. But the events occurring during industrial revolutions do not tell the entire story of human innovation. A quick look at the accepted time periods of the four industrial revolutions also reveals significant periods of time between revolutions. During these pauses, innovation does not cease entirely; it just occurs at a slower pace. The following section briefly examines how innovation can progress rapidly for short periods of time and why it can be a bewildering experience for those caught in the midst of such an era. In his 1979 book, Stalemate in Technology, economist Gerhard Mensch undertook a study of two hundred years of innovation. He found that innovation does not occur continuously. Instead, in exploring hundreds of innovations over the period 1740 to 1960, Mensch found a “dramatic alternation between periods of innovative abundance and innovative scarcity,” which he termed the “discontinuity hypothesis.”¹⁸

“Mensch’s “dramatic alternation” aligns with the pulses of innovation that occur during industrial revolutions—pulses that are sometimes accompanied by a sense that change is not just occurring more rapidly, but also accelerating. In a 2003 interview, Chris Meyer and Ray Kurzweil discussed a range of issues related to the pace of development in several human endeavors, including technology. Kurzweil noted that   While acceleration was there 500 years ago, it was at that point of an exponential where it looked like a flat, horizontal line. The first time the rate of change was really disrupted, was with the weavers in the English textile industry, who had had a weaving guild that had been passed down for centuries through their families. We’re entering an era of acceleration. The models underlying society at every level, which are largely based on a linear model of change, are going to have to be redefined.… The twenty-first century will be equivalent to 20,000 years of progress at today’s rate of progress.¹⁹”

“In 2016 Thomas Friedman examined this accelerating pace of change in his book Thank You for Being Late Friedman explores the impact of three interacting themes—technology, the market, and climate change—noting that “the market, mother nature, and Moore’s Law together constitute the Age of Accelerations in which we find ourselves.”²⁰ Another theme of Friedman’s book is that the current era has become quite dizzying for many people. Most of us hear about breakthroughs in biotechnology, robotics, artificial intelligence, and other areas of scientific endeavors, but we are unsure about where these advances will take us. In previous revolutions, the pace of absorption of new technologies was such that there was time to develop new laws, societal norms, and other systems that allowed people to understand and use the new technologies. That is not the case now. As Friedman notes, “Legislatures are scrambling to keep up, tech companies are chafing under outdated and sometimes nonsensical rules, and the public is not sure what to think.”²¹”

“This sense of accelerating change also applies to earth sciences and climate studies. The authors of a 2004 book, Global Change and the Earth System, examined the evidence for the impact of human activities on a range of earth systems. While the authors—experts in a variety of earth sciences—expected to see evidence of a “growing impact of the human enterprise on the earth system,” they discovered that there had been a change in the magnitude of this impact since the middle of the twentieth century.²² The authors noted that “one feature stands out as remarkable. The second half of the twentieth century is unique in the entire history of human existence on Earth. Many human activities reached take-off points sometime in the twentieth century and have accelerated sharply towards the end of the century. The last 50 years have without doubt seen the most rapid transformation of the human relationship with the natural world in the history of humankind.”²³ This trend in accelerating change since the 1950s was also highlighted in the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which notes that “warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and since the 1950s, many of the[…]”

Excerpt From War Transformed Mick Ryan