Why Accelerate? Why Now?

If you care about the future of humanity and choose to work toward the betterment of our species, you must make a decision about which path we should travel and how you are going to help get us on it. We currently face an inflection point, a cliff ahead, and the path we collectively choose will radically reshape our future. Will we choose to preserve and build upon the hard-won knowledge and progress of the last few hundred years? Or will we pretend ignorance and willfully drive off the cliff, collapsing civilization back into an era of ignorance and barbarism?

The cliff ahead is the convergence of the largely ignored debts we incurred while climbing the mountain of progress, and which are now coming due. Look deeply at nearly every major system we rely on and this quickly becomes obvious:

• Most that progress was built on the back of cheap energy, which has incurred a still increasing carbon debt, triggering unpredictable and accelerating climate disruptions.
• Our financial systems are built on ever increasing debt and financial abstractions that allow us to keep pushing payment further down the road.
• We have built vastly complex physical infrastructure that incur an increasing maintenance debt.
• We have created and evolved an increasing number of bureaucracies, which carry with them a poorly understood inertia debt, making our actions ever slower and more expensive.
• We have consumed resources and destroyed ecosystems, creating fundamental debts against the natural infrastructure we depend upon for life itself.
• We have developed short-sighted and unwise agricultural processes that are sustained only through the increasing use of fossil fuels and pesticides, while giving little consideration for the effects on human or ecosystem health.

The list is long, undeniable, and all point to the same conclusion—we have some very serious and complex debt coming due very soon. How can we deal with it? What path can we take to avoid the cliff ahead?

Decelerate

Many think we are just going too fast. Too much consumption, too much energy use, too much technology, too much progress for too many people. They believe the solution is to reduce our speed, reduce our population, and slow technological progress. If we are just safe and deliberate, then we can get things under control. And this is an instinctively logical reaction. If you are careening towards a cliff, it is probably wise to use the brakes. But the truth is that we have incurred too much debt already, we have too much momentum. The debt is too high, the carbon already in the atmosphere, the chemicals already in our air and water. Even if we slam on the brakes right now, we will just slide off the cliff anyway. In fact, doing so will most likely just cause the car to flip and roll, killing most of the occupants before it even reaches the cliff edge. Simply put, it is too late for this option.

Bail Out

So, if it is obviously too late to slow down before going off the cliff, the next logical instinct is to jump out of the car. It may hurt, but at least you’ll be alive. Most importantly, this is a choice you can make individually—no collective action required. You can simply exit society, start a homestead/commune/compound, stock up on food/ammo (depending on your politics), and sit on the sidelines, watching to see what happens. Yes, if everyone else drives off the cliff, you can feel pretty smug about your choice, but at some point you will need antibiotics, surgery, etc and all the people and technologies that could have saved you will be in pieces at the bottom of the cliff. Wouldn’t it have been a better use of your life to try and keep us from going off the cliff in the first place, instead of just watching it happen?

All that said, we do need to also build something akin to Asimov’s Foundation, to function as a backup to preserve what knowledge and technology we can, just in case we do end up going off the cliff. (If you are also working on this, please get in touch.)

Status Quo

The first two options require you to make a deliberate, rational choice. Conversely, maintaining our current trajectory requires no decision to be made and is therefore the default choice that most of us will make. We are enmeshed in a vastly complex system that we feel we have little control over, so we will just continue to go with the flow. Based on recent history, this is quite reasonable as things have mostly continued to just get better over time. Unfortunately, this belief only holds true for so long as you avoid inspecting it overmuch and is either delusional or blindly optimistic. The simple truth is that there is actually a cliff ahead and staying the course is the least rational choice you can make.

Accelerate

This is the scariest choice. It is the choice to clearly see the cliff ahead, acknowledge the truth of the situation, then floor it and get to work building wings so we can fly. Practically, it is the choice to be honest about where we are and how we got here, then double down on the acceleration of knowledge and technological development—the same choice that created nearly every advance humanity has ever made. And it is probably the only chance we have to continue to expand into our potential, to maintain a functioning civilization and continue to evolve a better one.

The problems we face are almost entirely technological in nature and they are threatening us at a rate that currently exceeds our capacity to develop solutions. We need to flip that so the solutions outpace the problems. Climate change was not caused by our progress, it was caused by our stupidity, and it likely could have been entirely avoided had we but accelerated our efforts on smarter solutions. How far along could we be on solar, fission, and fusion had we been working seriously on it for the last 50 years? How many diseases could we have eliminated had we not hampered ourselves with decelerationist ideologies around stem cells, genetic engineering, and fear of human trials? We can do so much more than we have.

The simple truth is that we are already on this self-made path of technological growth, and in choosing it, have sown the seeds for our own destruction. We have no reasonable choice but to accelerate our learning and technology in order to meet these challenges. All other choices lead to some form of collapse, the deaths of billions, and the end of our one brief shot at escape from the tyranny of nature and evolution. While this doesn’t mean we throw all caution to the wind, the risks of inaction are so significant that it does mean we need to be willing to take far more risks than we have in recent decades.

In the end, we have is to figure out how to create the conditions to turn our growth imperative from a self-destructive threat into an engine driving the fulfillment of our individual and collective potential, to go far beyond the limits of our current technological and physical constraints, to open up infinity. And the only way to do this without destroying ourselves is to significantly increase the pace at which we increase both our intelligence and our wisdom. To accelerate.