Threshold 9: Big History as a roadmap for the future

It is a strange and fascinating time to be alive. Modern societies and lifeways are changing faster than ever as new technologies rapidly reshape the nature of modern institutions, modes of communication, healthcare, education, relationships, and our views of what it means to be human and to live a good life. Masses of humans across the globe are at risk of succumbing to what the futurist Alvin Toffler called “future shock,” i.e., “the shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short a time.” With such rapid change in play, humanity badly needs a global roadmap for the future. Besides the issues of climate change, population growth, declining biodiversity, and sustainability, we must also think seriously about the rise of artificial intelligence, exponential growth trends in technological evolution, and the impacts of rapidly developing information technologies. In this chapter, Bohan develops a conceptual scaffold for a Threshold 9 story, focusing on the next hundred years. She proposes using the key concepts of the Great Acceleration and Kurzweil’s Law of Accelerating Returns to contextualize the immediate future as a transhuman era of accelerating social, technological and planetary change, and human-machine convergence. In addition, a provisional list of twelve major topics is presented that Bohan believes we should explore in this context of accelerating change. Even if a technological singularity never occurs, there will be enough social disruption in the immediate future to necessitate a common framework that can help us understand why the world is changing so fast today and help us imagine potential scenarios.