Invariants of the future
Change is the property of the universe.
In fact, I cant think of anything that resists it.
But some informational patterns presist for longer than others.
100% of your skin cells get overturned over the duration a year, but only 1% of your brain cells do.
I think something similar is true for our economy. Revolution by revolution – Cultural, Agricultural, Industrial, Digital – our world goes through constant flux. And yet, humans today, still show love, greed and sorrow like they did thousands of years ago. And that makes me ponder what will resist change going forward.
I. Taxonomy of change
The most obvious place to start is by looking at what simply cannot change.
Here is a list of things that go from the least to the most changeable:
- Laws of nature (rules/constraints) – physical laws are invariant, so far as anyone can tell
- Environment (evolved physical state of the world) – solar-systems, planets, continents, change on long geological timescales
- Biology (evolved structure of organisms) –
- Psychology (evolved and learned behaviour dispositions of organisms)
- Technology (property of how organisms change the world)
In the next 100 years, as the Intelligence Revolution with all it’s mighty AI chat-bots re-shapes our society once again, it is most reasonable to expect the bottom of this list to change first. So, for the purpose of this piece I will indulge in speculating about them.