The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning

by Jeremy Lent

A modern version of this process has occurred in the overexploitation of fisheries, where stocks decline as a result of being overfished from one generation to the next, but people forget how things used to be and consider the situation to be normal, until the next decline. The term “shifting baseline syndrome” has been coined to describe how people get used to each new level. This, perhaps, offers an answer to Jared Diamond's question of what that Easter Islander was thinking when he cut down the last tree. Most likely, he didn't think anything of it at all because, by then, the only trees left would have been little more than weeds, good for nothing more than weaving a mat.22

Larry Page, cofounder and CEO of Google's parent company, Alphabet (and therefore holding the power to direct Kurzweil's research program), has referred to human DNA as “600 megabytes compressed” of programming, arguing that “it's smaller than any modern operating system” and therefore our “program algorithms probably aren't that complicated.”58

What would it take to navigate toward a future consistent with a more inclusive view of humanity? When a system is stretched to breaking point, something has to give. In the Techno Split scenario, our economic model remains resilient, but our shared humanity is transformed beyond recognition. In a scenario where our shared humanity remains intact, the economic system driving our current trajectory would need to be transformed, along with its underlying values: the pursuit of never-ending material growth and the glorification of humanity's conquest of nature.