New Age of Anxiety Emerges in Tandem With Rapid Pace of Technological Change

In recent days, a dancing robot ran amok in a restaurant at Cupertino, California, an airplane hit a firetruck at LaGuardia Airport, and President Trump shifted his two-day ultimatum to Iran to a five-day ceasefire on energy infrastructure for negotiations.Vladimir Putin also offered to stop sharing intelligence with the Iranians if Mr. Trump stopped sharing intelligence with Ukraine (Mr. Trump apparently refused).The Strait of Hormuz closure has led to shortages and price hikes for agriculture, food production, chemical manufacturing, and most specifically oil.Meanwhile, I’ve been reading numerous stories about people having artificial intelligence boyfriends and girlfriends — and a Swiss train my wife Callista and I took last night to Bern from Visp was 16 minutes late (something which almost never happens on Swiss railroads).It occurred to me that we are in a world of constant change.I was reminded of Johan Huizinga’s 1919 book “The Waning of the Middle Ages.” When I first read it in graduate school in the 1970s, I was stunned by how simple and profound his observation was.Virtually all scholars look at the Middle Ages as a positive emergence of the Renaissance and modern government bureaucracies. Yet Huizinga looked at it from the viewpoint of people whose entire world was being shattered. Medievalism was swamped by modernity. Where Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci are seen in our time as brilliant pioneers in an emerging new world, Huizinga made the case that their break from the medieval world would have confused and terrified millions of people.I suspect much of the anxiety of the period through which we are living comes from a similar break between the world we have known and the emerging world we do not yet understand.The assumptions of the industrial era and the diplomacy of the established order which grew out of World War II were the norm — until recently. Both have been shaken by the many new currents of invention, power, and ideology.The Great Britain and France we once knew are gradually disappearing as the migration of unassimilated people (many of Islamic faith) profoundly change the politics and acceptable behaviors in those countries.Young people almost everywhere in the world are now connected into a digital world which produces influencers earning millions of dollars a year. The number of young men and women who have become influencers as their career goal is astounding.The rapid emergence of AI guarantees many changes which are so profound it is hard to intuit where they will lead us. I am working on a book about 2076 (the 300th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence). As I look at the various waves of change that are underway, I find it daunting to try to describe even just one day in the life of a person or family 50 years from now.The upcoming launch of Artemis II — and SpaceX’s continued progress in developing the reusable Starship that can lift 100 passengers or 100 tons into space — suggests scales of change that would once have seemed to be science fiction.Further, the scale of wealth held by the top few hundred rich people is beyond comprehension. We have yet to find this generation’s F. Scott Fitzgerald who can write “The Great Gatsby” of 2026. (Elon Musk just offered to pay the salaries of the TSA employees, as an example.)If you seem a little confused, daunted, and deeply uncertain, welcome to the club. We are now entering a world in constant change.

New Age of Anxiety Emerges in Tandem With Rapid Pace of Technological Change

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