It was perhaps Daniel Burnham who first noted that the rate of change was accelerating. In 1910 during the town planning conference of London, he noted, “a mighty change having come about in fifty years, and our pace of development having immensely accelerated, our sons and grandsons are going to demand and get results that would stagger us.”
William Ogburn described Peoples’ difficulty in dealing with change in his 1922 work “Social Change with Respect to Culture and Original Nature”. When the material conditions change, changes occur in society, but these changes do not synchronize exactly with the change in the material culture; this delay is referred to as the cultural lag. This societal phenomenon is explained by the fact that things around us tend to change rapidly and voluminously while our habits and laws tend to resist change and remain fixed for longer periods of time. This tendency was observed with motor vehicles: when vehicles got faster, it took time for society to modify the infrastructure and laws for faster vehicles. More recently, we see it in things like the internet, where society struggles with false news, appropriate taxation, etc.
These changes are inconvenient, but it represents an existential risk for humanity when it comes to AI or artificial intelligence. The critical issue is who controls it?
We are now seeing this gap between humans and machines narrowing, even bridged or eliminated. As mentioned previously Dr Bruce Lipton recognized the similarities of the cell membrane to that of a computer interface. Now human cell membranes are being used as a computer interface. On July 6, 2020, Science News published an article from Cambridge University. It wrote, “Researchers have developed a human cell ‘membrane on a chip’ that allows continuous monitoring of how drugs and infectious agents interact with our cells and may soon be used to test potential drug candidates for COVID-19.”
The rapid change effectively exposes people to culture shock, a sense of anxiety, depression, or confusion that results from being cut off from your familiar environment and norms. This is typically
observed when an individual visits a foreign country or society, but today things a changing around us. Training for culture shock is appropriate to address the psychological effects of these changes.