Plan for the Utopian Future, but accept the Dystopian Present

If you look at the red-versus-blue states of the US election, and compare this to the leave-versus-stay geographies of the Brexit vote, you can see a certain pattern. 

The sparsely populated country folk and the densely populated city folk seem to have very different views. A racist agenda? Spiritual belief systems at odds? Conservative versus Liberal differences? How did the pollsters in both regions get the outcomes so very wrong?

Is this some sort of quantum entanglement that makes two separate regions manifest such strong similarities? Kind of. If we rewind back a few hundred years we see a pattern where most people lived in the country areas within small communities, bonded by shared, simple living and a religious connection. 'Good people' who had 'good values'. 

Throw in two Industrial revolutions and we see urbanization beginning, with a dramatic soul-wrenching movement of people from the rural areas in search of the big city opportunity. Before the industrial period, over 80% of people lived in rural areas. As urbanization accelerated, small towns became medium-to-large cities, and eventually we saw the rise of the mega-cities.

The rural areas began to be denuded of wealth, power and opportunity. The city areas found wealth, power, but lost the depth of community and in many ways the sense of self. And so began a polarization of values between these two groups. As immigrants moved into countries like the USA and the UK, they tended to head to the cities in search of opportunity. Cities accepted and integrated the incoming skills and diversity as the economies flourished. The rural areas did not do as well in accepting or integrating with the new and different.

Yet, the differences between these two groups did not seem so bad in the old days. Why now? It is like a bolt from a clear blue sky! What most people do not realize is that we have become captured by the slow, insidious grip of the new Industrial revolution, which has been biting at us for the last 20 years. Computers, software, the Internet, Cloud services, and so on, are at the heart of this change.

It started slowly and began to disrupt jobs, industries, and communities. Then it accelerated, and will continue to do so at an ever-increasing rate, gobbling up jobs, eating the world and wreaking destruction across the lands of an almost biblical proportion.

Marc Andreessen: “Software Is Eating the World”

Destruction is hard for us humans to deal with - but it is part of the cycle of eventual renewal. The new revolution has brought labor-saving, opportunities, and empowerment to humans - but paradoxically also incredible complexity to people's lives. We are struggling to cope as we try and stay on this bucking bronco of technologically-induced change for all we are worth, but suffer from cognitive-overload, stress, and lack of sleep as a consequence. Our overpowering need to consume is an attempt to fill the void. More consumption means more money, better job, longer work hours, less sleep, more alienation from self. Its a terrible cycle made even worse, to those caught in this trap, when we see a loss of earnings over time caused by some external other.

This path of destructive change further undermines the rural areas that are already weakened; even as it continues the alienation of the city dwellers from their deeper selves. Deep in the human psyche there is a troubling dissonance. People feel at odds with themselves. A growing shadow self emerges: a problem with the (competitive) other.

Now we have President-elect Donald Trump appearing on the scene. His palpably, anti-other rhetoric wrapped into a candidacy, packaged as part of the legitimate Republican party, provides a formal way for people to vote and express their shadow, which alleviates the inner psychical pain. 

So many people want to become whole that they give up on the good. Was it just scratching an itch? Many may feel the weight of the new oppression and return to a state of dissonance. 

Ray Kurzweil's bestselling book The Singularity Is Near predicts an exponential increase in technologies like computers, genetics, nanotechnology, robotics and artificial intelligence.

Over the next decades we will see these incredible changes. Already humans cannot cope with the overpowering complexity that is emerging in technology. But software, artificial intelligence, blockchain, the Internet of Things, and so on, will usher in distributed autonomous systems to handle the complexity, where the role of the human will simplify, and cognitive overload will disappear.

Over time it will make sense for a dramatic reversal of urbanization. There will be less need to live in the cities. Strong movement back to the country areas will occur. A rebalancing over time. A re-establishment of human values and community. But there is no easy path to this Utopian future.

Donald Trump's dystopian present is just a symptom of a far greater invisible hand - the grip of the Industrial Revolution. We need to think about how to harness technology to bring hope and opportunity. If we resist and fear the technological changes yet to come, with all their disruption, we will miss out on the opportunity to build out a positive path for all humanity.

The change is coming either way. Of that we have no choice...