Some things in America are certainly accelerating. That includes things technological (think how quickly autonomous vehicles have progressed since 2004’s “Debacle in the Desert“) and sociological (gay marriage becoming legal in the U.S. just seven years after every Presidential candidate opposed it). Our world just often seems to move more rapidly to a conclusion of one sort or another in a wired, connected world, though the end won’t always be good, and legislation will be more and more feckless in the face of the new normal.

Of course, this sort of progress sets up a trap, convincing many technologists that everything is possible in the near-term future. When I read how some think robot nannies will be caring for children within 15 years, stuff like that, I think perfectly well-intentioned people are getting ahead of themselves. 

In a Forbes piece, Steven Kotler certainly thinks acceleration is the word of the moment, though to his credit he acknowledges that the tantalizing future can be frustrating to realize. An excerpt:

You really have to stop and think about this for a moment. For the first time in history, the world’s leading experts on accelerating technology are consistently finding themselves too conservative in their predictions about the future of technology.

This is more than a little peculiar. It tells us that the accelerating change we’re seeing in the world is itself accelerating. And this tells us something deep and wild and important about the future that’s coming for us.

So important, in fact, that I asked Ken [Goffman of Mondo 2000] to write up his experience with this phenomenon. In his always lucid and always funny own words, here’s his take on the dizzying vertigo that is tomorrow showing up today:

In the early ‘90s, the great science fiction author William Gibson famously remarked, “The Future is here. It’s just not very evenly distributed.” While this was a lovely bit of phraseology, it may have been a bit glib at the time. Nanotechnology was not even a commercial industry yet. The hype around virtual reality went bust. There were no seriously funded brain emulation projects pointing towards the eventuality of artificial general intelligence (now there are several). There were no longevity projects funded by major corporations (now we have the Google GOOGL -3.13%-funded Calico). You couldn’t play computer games with your brain. People weren’t winning track meets and mountain climbing on their prosthetic legs. Hell, you couldn’t even talk to your cell phone, if you were among the relatively few who had one.

Over the last few years, the tantalizing promises of radical technological changes that can alter humans and their circumstances have really started to come into their own. Truly, the future is now actually here, but still largely undistributed (never mind, evenly distributed).•