In the midst of everything that is changing - technology, politics, economics, the increasing fragility of our environment and our ability to connect to each other physically and digitally - one thing has hardly changed at all.
Us.
We may be able to live longer as we understand the mechanics of our bodies better, and we may have more, better educated people but that aside little has changed for millennia. Our human hardware and software has hardly changed.
As individuals, we are not noticeably brighter than Archimedes, or Plato, DaVinci or Marcus Aurelius.
As the global population has soared, we have moved from organising ourselves into tribes, then cities, then countries, then groups of countries. At work, we have gone from being artisans, to members of guilds, to servants of corporations.
Economically, it has been a phenomenal success, with almost everyone financially wealthier than their ancestors, maybe until now. In the “developed” world, for the first time, we are seeing a plateau, m…
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