But what if everything could change? What if, more than simply meeting the great challenges of our time – from climate change to inequality and ageing – we went far beyond them, putting today’s problems behind us like we did before with large predators and, for the most part, illness. What if, rather than having no sense of a diferent future, we decided history hadn’t actually begun?
We have faced changes as momentous as those which now confront us twice before. The first was around twelve thousand years ago as Homo sapiens, our ancestors, began to engage in agriculture for the first time. This consisted in the domestication of animals and crops, practically grasping how biological features can be bred both in and out of species. It wasn’t long before we had farming, animals performing labour and a relative abundance of food. This in turn created the social surplus necessary for the transition to sedentary society and with it cities, writing and culture. In short, life would never be the same again. This was both the end of something – hundreds of millennia of human ‘prehistory’ – and the start of something else.
It was the First Disruption.
After that not much would change for thousands of years. Yes, there was progress, as civilisations emerged and empires conquered, but fundamentally, the same sources of light, energy and warmth were available five thousand years ago as five hundred years ago. Life expectancy depended more on geography, social status and war than on technology and, until the last few centuries, most people ’s ‘work’ involved subsistence agriculture.
Then, around the middle of the eighteenth century, a new transformation began. The steam engine – along with coal – became the backbone of the Industrial Revolution and the first machine age. While it had taken all of recorded history for the world’s human population to reach 1 billion, it would take little more than a century to double once more. Now, new vistas of abundance opened up, with extended life expectancy, near-universal literacy, and increased production of just about everything. By the middle of the nineteenth century it was once again clear that something so seismic had taken place that, for better or worse, there was no going back.
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fully automated luxury communism