Give Your Ten-Year-Old a Ferrari

I was walking in my neighborhood one morning a few weeks ago, and I saw this.

A sign for a lemonade stand. This could be from almost any generation of the last century, whether my parents', mine, or my son's. What could be more quaint, adorable, timeless and Rockwellian than neighborhood kids with a lemonade stand?

Aside from the price of lemonade keeping pace with inflation (see the 5 cents price on the Rockwell drawing - yeah right!), I see one thing that sets this one apart -

Yes, that is a hashtag.

OK, I guess it's not employed in exactly the conventional way that hashtags are used. The hashtag #pleasecome might not do much to drive foot traffic to the lemonade stand, but that's not really the point. And I'm old, so what do I know anyway?

The point is that the world is changing fast. This goes beyond me sitting on my porch sipping the aforementioned glass of locally bought lemonade, watching the world go by. Imagine living a century ago - air travel was in its infancy, and now there are thousands of commercial flights every day. Tens of millions died in the 1918 influenza epidemic, and 2018 is considered a severe season with 172 pediatric flu deaths. The supercomputer from Apollo 11, that put two men on the moon, has a fraction of the power of the smartphone that you use to crush candy.

According to thinkers such as Peter Diamandis, author of "Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think", and Ray Kurzweil, author of "The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology", this unprecedented exponential rise in technological advancement has the potential to lead us to new heights as a global civilization. But as both Diamandis and Kurzweil would certainly admit (and have admitted in their writings, contrary to popular misconception), there is another side to the coin.

Imagine that humankind had a long infancy, from the first appearance of homo sapiens two million years ago, until the beginning of the Holocene Period 12,000 years ago. We were hunting and gathering, living in caves, and having little more impact on the world than our anthropoid ape cousins.

The Neolithic Revolution saw the advent of farming, language, and humankind's first real impact on the world. This could be analogous to growing from helpless infancy to becoming a toddler, learning to walk. Some stumbling and falling down, a few boo-boo's, but overall progress.

Fast forward to the Industrial Revolution: now our toddler is a 10-year old kid, riding a bicycle. A lot more freedom and progress, but also a lot more danger and potential negative impact on the world.

Relative to the long two-million year infancy and the 12,000-year toddler period, we are now only a scant 200 years into this new period of childhood. If the Industrial Revolution was a bicycle, our 21st century world of microprocessors and machine learning are like giving the 10-year-old a 1961 Ferrari 250 GT California. (maybe Ferris:Cameron::Kurzweil:Bostrom?)

What does all of this have to do with a lemonade stand sign with a hashtag?

The changes of the 21st century are expected to be exponentially larger than the 20th century, as the changes of the 20th century were exponentially larger than the century before. My father and I were born in the 20th century, and like him, I will likely die sometime before the end of the 21st century (unless...). But my son, born in the 21st century, is very likely to see the end of the 21st century, if life expectancy continues to increase.

That's 55 years after the Singularity, if Kurzweil is right (or at least 30-50 years, to hedge your bets.) What kind of world is that? It could be truly wondrous. Or it could be truly terrifying. I am entering this world of blogging, to explore what happens when you give a kid who uses hashtags on a lemonade stand sign a Ferrari. Holy crap.