We’re not built for this speed

Why rapid change — not change itself — is the real crisis we face

Credit: Professor Ed Hawkins (Creative Commons)

I do not wish to sound alarmist but the Moon is escaping. As it drifts away, the strength of the Earth’s tides will diminish and its rotation will slow. Our planet’s axis, today a stable angle of around 23.5°, may begin to vary wildly. And worst of all, we will lose those perfect solar eclipses, which only happen at this time because of a cosmic quirk: while the Sun is roughly 400 times larger than the Moon, it is also 400 times further away.

But there is some good news. By firing lasers off the lunar surface — reflectors were left by the Apollo astronauts — we know that the Moon is moving away from the Earth at a leisurely 3.78cm per year. That grants us time to, if not prepare, then at least appreciate the good times. And anyway, the Sun is expected to enter its Red Giant phase and swallow up the inner planets of the Solar System long before the Moon finishes its transit.

The point is that change itself is rarely the problem. Rather, it is the pace of change. I suspect that is part of the fear surrounding automation and artificial intelligence (AI). There is the usual fear of a new technology — that it will lead to mass unemployment at best, nuclear armageddon at worst. But with AI, there is a sense that, if it happens, it could be breathtakingly quick, leaving little time for adaptation.

When technological change occurs slowly, workers may simply retire out of affected professions while younger people who would otherwise have entered the field look and train elsewhere. In this way, unemployment is limited. But when change happens rapidly, it is far more disruptive. People lose their jobs, their livelihoods and often their sense of purpose. That is why economic shocks are so named, and why China’s supersonic rise into being a manufacturing superpower caused such difficulty for many manufacturing workers in the West.

Another arena where the pace of change matters is climate change. Were the Earth to be warming slowly, over the course of millennia, humans would have more time to adapt as well as to develop the zero carbon technologies necessary for our continued survival. Unfortunately, the planet is warming fast, and more to the point, there are certain thresholds and tipping points — whether up in the atmosphere or down in the seas — that once passed, could have calamitous effects.

Or take finance. The American economist Kenneth Rogoff has a new book just out, Our Dollar, Your Problem, which I look forward to reading. The book explores the rise of the US dollar as a global reserve currency, and explains why its future stability is far from guaranteed. It was timely before Donald Trump’s reelection and decision to blow up global trade, even more so now.

Rogoff has been doing the rounds to promote his book (Tyler Cowen, Martin Wolf, Ezra Klein) and he is clear that America’s “exorbitant privilege¹” — the term coined in the 1960s by then French finance minister, Valery Giscard d'Estaing, to describe the benefits accrued to the US for its ability to print the global reserve currency — would eventually be eroded, as newer entrants such as the euro or Bitcoin fight for market share.

But Rogoff argues that Trump’s actions have accelerated this change. Rather than taking place over decades, it could be compressed into a matter of years. Given the ever-increasing size of US government debt (and the cost of servicing it), this could become a major problem far sooner than policymakers had planned for, even before the imminent tax cuts that come with any Republican administration.

It seems we have come to hate two things: the way things are and change. But it is the pace of change that we really ought to fear. The faster it arrives, the harder it is to prepare, adapt and preserve what matters.

1. So-called because it enables the US government (as well as consumers) to borrow more cheaply as well as to impose painful financial sanctions on hostile regimes