The Great Acceleration

At the start of the year I reconciled myself to needing to begin using AI. I felt like I crossed a threshold at the end of this last week when I used AI three separate times in a work day (to generate excel formulas, edit some powerpoint slides, and to summarise in English a grant application in French).

I say ‘reconciled myself to’ because I am essentially tech-agnostic. AI is ravenous for energy and there are a lot of other factors that make me think we should proceed with caution (AI is advancing, are we?), but it is also a tool that has enormous potential if only we used it well.

There’s a notorious graph that is burned in my brain. It’s the exponential curve of the Great Acceleration, a term used to describe the terra-forming increase of human activity since the 1950s on almost every measure. alongside corresponding environmental degradation. It often appears alongside the concept of the Anthropocene, a proposed geological epoch marked by the influence of human activities on the Earth’s geology and ecosystems.

This graph is the reason I don’t believe AI will save us any time. Technology doesn’t make our lives easier, it makes our lives faster. And AI is the next mechanism by which we will spin the hamster wheel more quickly.

Technology doesn’t make our lives easier, it makes our lives faster.

This is no accident. Our financial system is characterised by an imbalance between debt and income, leading to a situation where the economy needs to “run faster” to service and facilitate growing levels of debt.

The debt we create in the financial system is subject, unlike the earth, to the laws of mathematics, not physics. Whereas nature’s growth curve is almost flat; the rate of simple interest’s curve is linear. Compounded interest’s curve is exponential.

Crucially, in order for the capital gains needed to repay debts to be made, capital growth must increasingly outstrip resources to ever greater extents.

We’ve done this to date through the processes of globalisation / optimisation / efficiency. We pressure the (international) workforce into accepting lower wages and longer hours. We thin out supply chains to eliminate redundancy and establish just-in-time production systems. We expand energy and resource production and consumption to meet the demands of increasing our outputs.

In the midst of this, we find ourselves victims of the Jevons paradox, which states that in the long term, an increase in efficiency in resource use will generate an increase in resource consumption rather than a decrease (side note: this is why you should be sceptical of any company who tells you they are addressing their environmental impact via efficiency gains). It is a cruelty that the means by which we meet the speeds demanded by the hamster-wheel economy in turn increase the demands of said hamster-wheel.

There is no reason why this should be inevitable. These are consequences of our own financial systems being geared towards profit maximisation. Embedding the profit motive subjects every gain in efficiency to what I am going to term “acceleration capture”. If the financial system can monetise something, it will, and speed is something that it is compelled to monetise.

There is no reason why this should be inevitable

And so it is that AI won’t save you time; AI is the next mechanism the hamster-wheel economy will use to “run faster” to service and facilitate growing levels of debt.

Of course, you won’t find anyone marketing AI to you by telling you it will make your life faster. The AI revolution is coming because the financial system is optimising for profit, but it knows better than to advertise that fact. Instead, we’ll pretend that the growth of AI will meet our desire for convenience, and hard-bake it into our life until circumventing AI really is an inconvenience. We’ll still be on the same hamster-wheel – it will just be turning faster.

Again there is no reason why this should be inevitable. These are consequences of our own financial systems, and these are systems that we built. The Bank of England isn’t in some way irreproachable or fundamental – it was initially a private institution established by people who wanted to support the war effort in France. Which is to say, the intention of writing this is not to scare you into believing the significant changes on the horizon are being driven by forces beyond your control, it’s to draw attention to the fact that changes are driven and we should be wise to this.

Technology doesn’t make our lives easier, it makes our lives faster. But that needn’t be the case.