The Remaining Two Flows of the Shift Age: The Flow to Global and the Flow to the Individual

In the last column, I wrote about the most disruptive flow, the Accelerating Electronic Connectedness. The flow to global and the flow to the individual are both amplified by this AEC. All three point to the inevitability of the global stage of human evolution. Let’s take a look at why.

Flow to Global

As the photo in the above linked column shows, two women in rural Africa are your neighbors in the sense that you can reach them whenever and wherever they are. The 21^st century version of the backyard fence over which to speak to your neighbor is the smartphone So, the technological connectedness in 2026 means that, for the first time in human history, we can all communicate with all humanity, day or night. The technology of communications has provided us with an unprecedented platform to deal with all the global issues we face. Most of the content coursing through the fast as speed of light fiber optics is free and available to all.

The Flow to Global also means that problems we face are now global in scope. Problems that can only be solved by all of us. These are all big problems that cannot be solved by nation states:

-the climate crisis has yet to be faced by nation states because they can’t solve it

-the historically unprecedented global wealth inequality is a global problem not one for nation states.

-the rapidly developing technology of TI/AI that has been growing globally will not remain a nation state competition. The issues with TI/AI currently is that we are in the corporate competition stage, which will not last and will be looked back on as the old, nation state and capitalist mindset that, in the short run, launched the Age of Intelligence

Flow to the Individual

All of us are more powerful as individuals than we have ever been before. The vast majority of us have smartphones that provide the greatest decentralized computing power ever. My iPhone 13 has more computing power than my Dell laptop in 2000. It is also faster and with more RAM and storage, and of course connects me to some 8.3 billion people, from wherever and whatever time it might be.

I have read a lot of science fiction in my life and some of it has visions of humans having computers in their pockets. That is now science fact. The computing power of my iPhone is greater that the biggest mainframe computers in the world around the time of my college graduation.

So we are getting organized around all of us and each of us simultaneously. Both due to the Accelerating Electronic Connectedness flow.

My vision of the Shift Age in 2006 was that from that time to roughly the middle of the 2030-2040 decade means that we still have 5-10 years left in the age. That is the reason for these recent columns, as most readers of this Evolutionshift newsletter are concerned with the current state of global affairs and a darkening sense of the future and did not read my writings and speeches of the last 20 years.

We are in the Shift Age, a time where everything is in a state of shift, of disruption, of accelerating change, of new realities. This age is a time of transition from what was in the 20^th century to what will be in the 21^st century..

The 2020s is the last full decade of the Shift Age. We are at the pinnacle of the age. More on this current decade in upcoming columns.

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