The clock of the long now3/20/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() We are not the culmination of history, and we are not start-over revolutionaries we are in the middle of civilization’s story. Around 1000 B.C.E., thanks to the Jews, history emerged as another form of storytelling.Įno’s Long Now places us where we belong, neither at the end of history nor at the beginning, but in the thick of it. Over time the empires and religions told larger and longer stories about themselves, many of them overlapping and referring to one another. “If one is mentally out of breath all the time from dealing with the present, there is no energy left for imaging the future.” This is the realm of immediate responsibility, one in which we feel we have volition, where the consequences of our actions are obvious and surprises limited. I don’t have any more parachutes.”įor most of us most of the time I think Eno is right: “now” consists of this week, slightly haunted by the ghost of last week. I remember remarking to myself as I pulled my reserve chute, “I hope this one works. My parachute malfunction was statisically inevitable. ![]() So besides having a hell of a good time skydiving, I learned three visceral-level lessons. “What people mean by the word technology is the stuff that doesn’t really work yet.” People call it change, and rather than yearn for it, they brace themselves against its force. Now that we have progress so rapid that it can be observed from year to year, no one calls it progress. The aggregate value of other users was so great that they could not afford to miss the boat. Metcalfe’s Law explains why 50 million people had to get on the Internet in just a few years. “We are moving from a world in which the big eat the small,” remarked Klaus Schwab, head of the World Economic Forum, “to a world in which the fast eat the slow.” offers hope, the second extends a warning.” Kairos is the time of cleverness, chronos the time of wisdom.Īccording to a rule of thumb among engineers, any tenfold quantitative change is a qualitative change, a fundamentally new situation rather than a simple extrapolation. The ancient Greeks distinguished two kinds of time, “kairos (opportunity or the propitious moment) and chronos (eternal or ongoing time). Luck you cannot do much about speed you can. The deer frozen in the headlights, the driver frozen at the wheel with no time to brake or swerve-both are doomed by speed and bad luck. “We are the first generation that influences global climate, and the last generation to escape the consequences.” What do we owe the future humans? Existence, skills, and a not-bad world. We owe the past humans our existence, our skills, and our not-bad world. The future has been shrinking by one year per year for my entire life.ĭouglas Carlston noted that the institution to maintain this project will be as much of a design challenge to last one hundred centuries as the Clock or the Library. Now, thirty years later, they still talk about what will happen by the year 2000. When I was a child, people used to talk about what would happen by the year 2000. The main problems might be stated, How do we make long-term thinking automatic and common instead of difficult and rare? How do we make the taking of long-term responsibility inevitable? What a prime subject for vapid truisms and gaseous generalities adding up to the world’s most boring sermon. ![]()
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